


Keep the Car Running

by earlgreytea68



Series: KtCR [1]
Category: Inception (2010), Sherlock (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-18
Updated: 2015-04-15
Packaged: 2018-02-17 20:20:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 31
Words: 125,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2322008
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/earlgreytea68/pseuds/earlgreytea68
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If Mycroft Holmes lived in a world where people could steal information from the subconsciouses of others, tell me he wouldn't be all over that when he had Moriarty in custody.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Okay. So. Long intro. Starting with: Once upon a time, completely and utterly out of the blue, I fell so totally in love with Arthur/Eames as a couple that it was *ridiculous.* And then I had the idea set forth in the summary of this fic. And then it *wouldn't go away.* And then I was like, "I have to write this."
> 
> If you haven't seen Inception or you've only seen it once and don't remember it, no worries. Because if you're sitting there like, "Wait, I've seen this movie, I don't remember this couple in it," it's because they *literally* share, like, two minutes of screen time. [LITERALLY. HERE. YOU CAN WATCH IT ALL AND BE TOTALLY CAUGHT UP WITH CANON.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyA26irCGk0) There are, like, two other good shippy moments not contained in there but nothing really crazy, just stuff you cling to when your entire canon is two minutes. 
> 
> And that is what drew me in so thoroughly about Arthur/Eames. To the extent that they exist, they are almost entirely fan-created. Some really good, clever people had some really good, clever ideas about these characters and they *wrote,* oh, God, some of the most beautiful, fantabulous fics I've ever read, it's astonishing. And what it all means is that I'm kind of just writing to fit in with fan tradition. And, if I've done my job right, you should fall in love with Arthur and Eames on their own merits, almost like they're original characters, without knowing anything about their backstory. Because other than two minutes of sniping flirtationyness if you squint, they don't *have* a backstory. The fans made it all out of wholecloth and it is amazing and remarkable and I *love* it. 
> 
> So. If you come here as already an Arthur/Eames fan (and there are so many more of you than I realized! Why did you not tell me about this awesome ship before?? I am frowning at all of you), I hope you like my take on them. And if you come here as not yet an Arthur/Eames fan, I hope the same thing, and that you *are* an Arthur/Eames fan by the time this fic is over. I am hoping to convince you. I've given myself 31 chapters to do it in. They're not, I don't think, very much like any other characters I've ever written before, on one level. And, on another level, maybe they're exactly the same. I don't know, it did turn out that Arthur and Sherlock got along much better than I thought that they would, and it's hard to be objective about them anymore, I've lived with them so long that I've become ridiculously protective, especially of Arthur, who stole my heart very unexpectedly during the writing of this fic. 
> 
> If you get totally smitten and want more Arthur/Eames, YAY. Or if you just want to do some background reading. Knackorcraft over on Tumblr has done [THE MOST AMAZING JOB of compiling a bunch of Inceptiony goodness](http://knackorcraft.tumblr.com/inceptionguide) for newbies to the fandom. She is single-handedly trying to start an Inception insurgence here. (She's got fics on her rec list I haven't stumbled across yet and you have no idea how much I am resisting reading ALL OF THEM TONIGHT.)
> 
> The story also has a [playlist](http://earlgreytea68.tumblr.com/post/97499374426/and-heres-the-inceptionlock-playlist-more-about). The title does come from [the Arcade Fire song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEZockGkEyY) (and it will be said by a character at some point, for those who like when the titles show up in the fics ;-)), but the main writing song of this fic was [Josh Ritter's "Change of Time."](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHMx5xbejz8)
> 
> SO many people to thank this time around. I was *so nervous* about writing these characters, you have no idea. I kept roping people into reading it over to make sure I wasn't insane. Thank you to snookiescookies, who inspired me to try my hand in this fandom in the first place and whose compliment on my Eames voice meant the world since she writes my literal favorite Eames in the entire fandom. Thanks to Kristin, who read over the first couple of scenes when I was freaking out about having put them on paper at all and said, "HOW DO YOU KNOW SO MUCH ABOUT BEING A CRIMINAL. WRITERS ARE AMAZING," and that's basically my favorite comment on writing ever. Thank you to mykmyk, who read it over and soothed me that I wasn't a crazy person and it did work. Thank you to knackorcraft, who has been cheerleading like crazy and has these really deep thoughts about my writing that make me feel like I need to pretend that I totally intended to be all Aristotelian, yup. And to arctacuda, who is *so* long-suffering and probably has no idea how much I completely appreciate it. She is always my first and last sanity check, and extra-thanks to her for so patiently going through it to be like, "People who have not spent the last nine months of their lives mainlining Arthur/Eames fic will probably need this explained."

_Part I: Depending on Your Focus: Moriarty, or Arthur & Eames_

Chapter 1

Normally, Eames didn’t attract tails with such flair. 

Which was why it took him an inexcusably long time to pick up on it. But being followed by a sleek black sedan didn’t happen to him often: not when he was on his own, had lain low for months, had a dry spell of interesting work, and was doing nothing more suspicious than taking a walk that _happened_ to take him past the art gallery that had the sweet little sculpture in the window that Eames just _happened_ to like. There was no law against liking art or walking through a neighborhood. 

Eames, having spotted and confirmed the tail, spent the evening trying to determine who the tail might be. None of the usual suspects would ever have employed anything like that black sedan. Eames brushed up on false documents and fake identities but let his curiosity get the better of him. The next night he stepped off the pavement and directly in front of the car, which was only supposed to tap him, since it had been going slowly enough to stop in plenty of time. 

That was his first mistake. 

***

Eames woke to the familiar feeling of a cannula in his arm and the relatively unfamiliar feeling of being in an actual bed, with a _blanket_ on him, all official. For a confused moment he cast his memory back to remember what sort of posh job he’d taken where he’d got himself all tucked into bed before going below. 

And then the faint sound of beeping came to him, which he placed as keeping the rhythm of his heart, and that was when he remembered stepping off the curb, and then he opened his eyes, full of righteous indignation. 

There was a man in the room with him, dressed in an impeccable three-piece suit and twirling an umbrella. Eames thought that men with a fondness for three-piece suits were the bane of his existence. He thought he should suggest, next time he saw Arthur, that he start carrying an umbrella of his own, for flourishing purposes. Eames had a sudden vision of Arthur whacking somebody over the head with the umbrella with one of his patented scowls and decided that, actually, the umbrella would be a good suggestion. 

“You ran me over with your car,” Eames accused. 

The man lifted his eyebrows as if he was surprised that Eames was upset at being _hit_ by a _car_. “You’re perfectly all right,” he said.

“I’m in _hospital_ ,” Eames pointed out. 

The man shrugged and regarded his umbrella closely. “It was a mild concussion. And a couple of bruised ribs.” 

“I’m going to bloody sue you,” announced Eames cheerfully, pulling the cannula out because Eames didn’t stay in hospital longer than he had to stay in hospital. 

“You’ve surely had worse injuries in your past,” continued the man off-handedly, still looking at his umbrella. 

Eames regarded him, sizing him up, this odd tail he’d picked up and who had done an extraordinarily half-hearted job of killing him when given the chance. His hand itched to dig his poker chip out of his pocket, but there was no way he could do it gracefully in his current position. “Or you could just offer me a settlement now,” suggested Eames, deciding that he wasn’t going to remark on the fact that he’d been followed until this man did. 

“I thought you might re-think your use of the criminal justice system,” remarked the man, finally putting his umbrella down and looking Eames straight in the eye. He had clear gray eyes and a hooked nose and a displeased mouth and thinning hair, and Eames catalogued every feature with habits born of a lifetime of forgery. One never knew when one might need to impersonate the new person in one’s life. “If you’re quite done, perhaps we can get down to business.” 

“Quite done with what?” Eames asked. 

“The _acting_ , of course.” 

Eames, after a moment, grinned. “I’ve no idea where you got your intel on me, but I _never_ stop acting, mate.” 

***

Despite being tucked up tight into a hospital bed, he’d been left dressed, which Eames accepted with gratitude when he had to follow the mysterious man down a corridor in which many other people were wearing undignified hospital gowns. Eames couldn’t quite determine where he was, as it didn’t seem to be a normal hospital. There wasn’t a single window, and other than patients and doctors and nurses, there was no one around. No _regular_ person. Not a single civilian. Eames had the impression they were underground. 

And, even worse than all of this, there was no poker chip in his pocket. Not a good sign. When the thing that guaranteed reality to you went missing, it left you feeling adrift. This could be a dream Eames was in, which would have explained his missing totem. Or maybe it wasn’t a dream and the poker chip had been confiscated at the same time as his likewise-missing wallet by people who hadn’t—or had—known how important the poker chip would be to Eames getting his bearings. Eames was honestly torn in half as to which scenario seemed more likely. 

He followed the man in the suit easily enough, because he didn’t think there was any point in offering up a protest. Instead he said, “It isn’t acting; you hit me with your car.” 

“You stepped off the curb,” responded the man, mildly, without slowing his stride. 

“You were following me.” 

The man said nothing, merely pushed open a door to what was clearly an interrogation room. The man gestured him in, and Eames hesitated on the doorstep, regarding the table piled with a stack of folders, the two chairs, and the two-way mirror on the wall. Eames was, as a general rule, not the world’s most enormous fan of interrogation. If this was a dream, he thought, wouldn’t he be able to dream himself up a gun and get out of here? Dreams, after all, were easy for him. Dreams were his literal job. He had always been an effortless natural at manipulating dreams. 

Eames tried very hard to dream himself up a gun. No such luck. Possibly this was real life. 

“Dinner would have been so much more polite,” he remarked. “A nice piece of steak, some good wine.” 

“Paid for with someone else’s credit card?” asked the man benignly. 

Eames shrugged, refusing to rise to any bait. The key to interrogation was to _not_ be the person they were convinced you were. And this person seemed keenly convinced that Eames was _Eames_ , so it was time to start being someone else entirely. Which, luckily, was not overly difficult for a forger to be. He couldn’t change his features outside of dreamspace, but he could change the rest of him easily enough no matter where he was. “Your private proclivities are none of my concern,” he said, and stepped into the room because he hadn’t been able to determine any other options. He sat as if he had decided to sit, as if there had been a choice, and carefully arranged himself carelessly in the chair. 

The man sat opposite him and looked at the first folder on the stack. “Ah,” he said. “Diamond necklace, Monte Carlo.”

Eames didn’t frown outwardly, because Eames wasn’t being Eames at the moment, but he internally frowned a whole lot. Of all the things for this man to lead off with, a ridiculous petty crime of a nondescript diamond necklace, pawned off years ago to finance a move to South America? That had merited all of this over-the-top drama? 

The man looked at the next folder. “Forged insurance policy used to collect monies for a destroyed restaurant in Prague. Which I suppose also adds arson to the list.” The man picked up another folder. “Smuggling an indicted corporate spy away from the extradition treaties, using very clever passports.” Another folder. “Ah, yes, the small business of one Frederick Milbanks, who never existed except for the week he spent robbing fellow guests blind at a resort on the Black Sea.” The man looked up from the files, lifting his eyebrows. “I can go on all day.” He gestured to the rest of the files in the stack. 

“Is it possible to get some popcorn or something?” asked Eames. “I didn’t know there was going to be a story-telling hour.” 

The man smiled a thin, unamused smile and pushed the folders off to the side. “I have need of your services. We can do this the easy way or the hard way. The easy way involves money. The hard way doesn’t.” 

“What services?” asked Eames blandly. This was not the way things were done. Clients didn’t approach _forgers_ first. Eames got jobs from his contacts in the industry, not from being hit by cars and revived in questionable hospitals with his totem gone. 

“You know exactly which services,” the man almost snapped. 

Eames thought it was possible he was getting to him, which was good because Eames much preferred to eventually work his way under the skin of unbearable men in three-piece suits. “Okay. You’ve got me. I am very good at making meringue. Little-known fact, but clearly your intelligence is solid.” 

The man just looked at him. 

“This isn’t about sex, is it?” continued Eames, almost enjoying himself now. “I mean, I’m well aware of my reputation, but, just between you and me, it might be ever so slightly exaggerated, just a tad, to—”

“So I take it you’re choosing the hard way?” interjected the man. 

“In my experience, they’re both going to end up being hard ways, so I might as well choose the way that’s more fun.”

The man narrowed his eyes at him. 

“Why don’t you tell me what it is that you think I can do for you, and then I’ll make a final decision?” suggested Eames, with what he considered great magnanimity. 

“Do you think that you’re in a position to be negotiating?”

“I always think I’m in a position to be negotiating. If I do say so myself, it’s basically my best feature. Even more so than the only-slightly-exaggerated enormous penis we were just discussing.” 

The man’s expression didn’t flicker at all, although he leaned back in his seat. Eames decided to interpret this as: _fine, you’re slightly amusing_. Arthur was far more fun to tease. Eames would have to tease him an extra lot the next time he saw him, just to wipe the taste of this subpar three-piece-suit encounter out of his mouth. 

“I’m in need of a forger. Not for government documents. Trust me, there is no government document you could make that I couldn’t replicate immediately.”

Eames decided to pretend to be polite enough not to make a skeptical noise at that. 

“I need a _forger_ ,” the man continued, and lifted his eyebrows meaningfully. 

Eames lifted his eyebrows back, annoyed at all of this subterfuge. If this man wanted to hire a forger for an extraction, he could bloody well just come out and say it. If Eames had wanted to be a spy, he would have been a fucking spy. “I hope you find one, then,” said Eames. 

The man spoke through his teeth. “It’s a complicated, sensitive, _government_ job.” 

_Government_ was the wrong word to use. Eames hated working for governments. He hated jobs that had to do with things that weren’t money, and government workers were always some unholy mixture of greed and some lunacy they gussied up as _patriotism_. Eames had lived in an even hundred of the nations on the planet and affected more accents than he could remember any longer, dreamed in languages only his subconscious recalled how to speak, and he didn’t mind England enough that he had left it as the accent he spoke in, but he wasn’t about to start working for the sodding British government, thank you very much. “My spelling’s atrocious,” said Eames, “so I’m afraid I’d make a very bad bureaucrat. Even spellcheck is no match for me.” 

The man said, “It involves confidential information, the utmost secrecy.” 

Eames was offended and let himself look it. He’d been a forger for many more years than most people survived in a frankly brutal business, and at least fifty percent of that was because he kept his mouth shut and didn’t attract attention. He understood that forgers had the luxury of knowing how to lay low as a profession, of just having to wait for business to come to them. Extractors had to go out and drum up business; it made them more obvious targets when things went bad, more likely to spill secrets in an attempt to find the next mark and put more food on the table. 

What Eames said, as true as anything he’d said yet on this strange day, was, “Doesn’t sound like the job for me.” 

The man gave him that thin smile again. “Doesn’t it?” 

“No,” Eames responded flatly. He was tired of this conversation. He wasn’t curious; he didn’t want to know any more. He wanted to get out of here, choose a passport, and flee to Santiago or something. “Look, if you want a forger, surely you have one already in your employ.” He cast his eyes meaningfully around the interrogation room. 

“We do. But I am assured you are the best.”

Eames almost laughed. He _was_ , but he couldn’t imagine who would have said that. “It’s possible they were talking about my penis again. I know it can get confusing, but—”

“We have…I believe you would call him a mark? Who has proven difficult. Tricky. We need the best. I was told that was you.”

Eames regarded him for a second. “That’s not how it works. You don’t go out and get a forger and throw him into a dream alone. Forgers don’t go in and steal information by themselves. There needs to be a _team_. No intelligent forger is going to leap into a dream without—”

“Without a point man?” finished the man. 

Eames had been going to say “without an extractor they trusted.” It was the extractors who did the work, found the marks, pulled off the stealing. It was the extractors who were the cocky, annoying bunch who considered themselves to run the show. Teams started with extractors. 

Teams didn’t start with point men. Extractors found point men the way they found the rest of them. The mention of a point man made Eames narrow his eyes. There was something purposeful about it that made him go a little cold. There was no good reason to mention _point man_ at this juncture. This conversation was all well and good when Eames was the only one involved. Eames didn’t want to have a discussion about who the best point man in the business was. 

Eames said carefully, “That’s a start.”

“You can choose your team,” said the man. 

_You mention point man and tell me I can choose my team_ , thought Eames, and recognized the nudge there, because he was a forger and he knew how to use the existing thoughts of a person’s brain to get what you wanted. _Hasn’t it been a while since you’ve worked with the point man you prefer? Don’t you have more fun when you have Arthur on the job with you? Weren’t you just feeling listless over how dull and rote dreamsharing had become? You can choose your team here_. It was clever, and it was terrifying, because Eames didn’t even think _Arthur_ thought Eames liked working with Arthur better than anyone else in the entire dreamsharing world. Eames thought he’d gone to quite a lot of trouble to keep Arthur off of anybody’s radar when they were thinking about Eames.

Which meant this man knew more than possibly anyone else on the planet. Which was never a good thing. Not under any circumstances. Especially not these. 

He wasn’t getting involved in this, and Arthur _definitely_ wasn’t. It wasn’t that Arthur couldn’t handle it, probably better than Eames could, damn him. It was just that Eames had made it a personal goal of his not to get Arthur into trouble if he could help it. 

Well. Not _serious_ trouble. That little bit of trouble over the counterfeit currency in St. Thomas that time, that had been _fun_. 

Eames thought about Arthur in a three-piece suit in fucking _St. Thomas_ , vetoing Eames’s in-no-way-serious-to-anyone-but-Arthur suggestion that they steal a rickshaw; stealing a car and then overturning a cart of kitschy painted coconuts in order to get them a head start; and then being so furious about it all afterwards that Eames had been treated to the most hilarious lecture of his life. Arthur, in his three-piece suit, ranting on the beach over a couple of counterfeit dollars, his thousand-dollar Italian leather shoes sinking into salt-stained sand. 

And Eames said, to this annoying mysterious government operative, “No.” And then, after a moment, “Thanks for the offer, though.”

The man didn’t look displeased, which Eames liked less than if he’d looked displeased. He glanced at the stack of files on the table. “And what do you suggest I do with all of these files?”

“Catch the perpetrators of the crimes?” said Eames, deciding he may as well go for broke. 

“Oh, I already have,” said the man, and he smiled then and turned one of the files around to face Eames. 

Eames took the bait because he didn’t know what else to do. Affecting intense boredom, he opened the file. And it wasn’t his face, wasn’t his name littered all over the file the way he had expected, the way it should have been because he had done every single thing that had been mentioned. It was _Arthur’s_. 

Eames fought not to react, channeling the persona of an innocent person who didn’t care about Arthur and his stupid, sharp, irritated edges. He reached for another file, trying to look merely casually curious, and opened it. Arthur again. Arthur’s face, in a grainy, faraway photo, but there was no mistaking it if you were Eames and definitely no mistaking the cut of that obscene suit. 

“I’ve learned a great deal by now about where to exert the pressure to get a person to do as you wish. It’s so very seldom that the pressure should be exerted directly on the person. The pressure points usually lie elsewhere.”

Eames closed the files he’d taken and arranged them very carefully and neatly, thinking hard. 

“I think you should take the easy way, Mr. Eames. I think you should ring your point man, and I think you should tell him to come to London. I do not think he would be pleased with the outcome should you choose the hard way. The United States can sometimes be _so_ cooperative when it comes to extradition. And, really, they have turned out to be remarkably good at spying on their own citizens.” 

Eames sat back in the uncomfortable interrogation chair and folded his arms. He had no idea where Arthur was at the moment. He could have found him, given a bit of time, but he didn’t generally automatically keep tabs on Arthur unless something out of the ordinary happened. Like this. For all he knew, this man in front of him knew exactly where Arthur was. And Eames didn’t think this man actually gave a damn about extradition treaties. 

“Ring Arthur?” he clarified. “And tell him to come on a secret government job I know nothing about? Arthur doesn’t even _like_ me. You think he’ll just drop everything and come, do you?”

The man smiled, and Eames felt a cold trickle down the back of his neck. “Yes, Mr. Eames,” he said confidently. “I very much do.” 

Eames considered without making it look like he was considering. Ringing Arthur might be a good thing, actually. If this was a dream, Arthur’s behavior would give it away. Eames could think of no forger who would be able to impersonate Arthur well enough to fool Eames. And if Arthur was merely Eames’s subconscious’s projection of him, then Eames was about to have very good phone sex in front of some mysterious government operative and then find some way to kill himself to wake himself up from this bloody annoying dream. And if Arthur was Arthur and this was all real life, then Eames was going to tell him to stay far the hell away from London, demand his poker chip back, and, if he had to, find himself someone else to work with on this ridiculously covert mission.


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter 2

Arthur had a cell phone. A secret cell phone that only a few people knew the number to. His parents and his sister. Dom, because at about the time Arthur had let Dom sob himself to sleep on his shoulder, Arthur had thought maybe he should acknowledge that he possibly no longer behaved like he was just Dom’s point man.

And Eames. Not that Eames knew he had the secret number. Arthur knew that Eames assumed that every number he’d ever had for Arthur was a burner cell phone, specific to the job they were working. Arthur _did_ keep a new burner cell phone for each job, so Eames’s assumption made sense. Arthur had given Eames the number, feeling like an idiot, because at the time he and Eames had worked together a grand total of twice. Arthur couldn’t believe how starry-eyed and foolish he’d felt when their paths had crossed again, but still he couldn’t resist giving Eames that little piece of himself that Eames was never even going to know about.

Eames had used it for the course of the job, and the next job they’d had together, Eames had leaned forward and said, _Normally I’d at least make a pretense of buying you a drink before asking you this, but you, darling, owe me your phone number, I believe_. Arthur hadn’t said, _You have the secret phone number that will stick with me and always be answered_ ; Arthur had said, _Do you get phone numbers from your conquests, Eames? I thought you just made do with hurried alleyways and fake names_. Eames had given him an exaggeratedly sad look and said, _Darling. What you must think of me._ And Arthur had said, in the world’s most blatant lie, since he had made Eames the fifth recipient of the coveted Arthur Official For Real Cell Phone Number, _I don’t_. And then he had written out the number of the latest burner cell phone.

So Eames didn’t know he had the super-special Arthur phone number, but Arthur felt secure enough in the knowledge that if Eames ever really, _really_ needed him for something, Eames would call every number he’d ever had for Arthur, which would eventually lead him to the one that Arthur would answer. Keeping track of Eames could have been a full-time job, and Arthur _had_ a full-time job, most of the time, so when he was immersed in peeling back layers of research to get at the heart of a mark and didn’t have time to send out feelers about whether Eames was causing trouble somewhere, he depended on the continued silence of his phone. (His family seldom called him, because they thought he had a Very Important Job and they hated to bother him. Dom sent him endless amounts of photo texts of the kids. Arthur had his texts on silent, and every week or so he cleaned them out and sent Dom generic appreciations of them. Not because he didn’t love the kids, but mostly because he didn’t know how to say, _Yes, they’re very cute_ in the endless number of iterations Dom seemed to think him capable of.)

All of that was to say that Arthur should have expected that the one time in his entire life when Eames would call him between jobs, he wouldn’t call the right phone. That was Eames to a painful T.

Arthur was running point on a job he hated. Well, not true: the job was actually rather interesting as corporate espionage went. Lots of bruised alliances and boardroom dalliances and Arthur didn’t often admit that he had a weakness for soap operatic drama but he totally did. So he didn’t mind that he was spending his time wading through surveillance on the mark, because the mark was juggling three separate mistresses, and Arthur was having a fascinating time trying to determine which one the mark might be most likely to confide in.

What Arthur really didn’t like about the job was the rest of the people on the team. It was a subpar team, with a not great extractor to get the information, and a flighty architect who was building a dreamscape that Arthur suspected was shaky and unreliable. Arthur knew it was risky and reckless of him to have agreed to this team, not because they’d betray him—he’d never agree if that was the case—but because they were _stupid_. But Arthur was good at what he did, organizing the entire job, getting the research into comprehensible chunks and the plan into shape, and considered a less-than-sharp team to be a challenge. Besides which, he wasn’t crazy about most of the dreamsharers out there these days. If he waited for a team he _wanted_ to work with, he’d never take any jobs. And it was true that Arthur didn’t need the money and could live the rest of his life on what he already had, even slightly extravagantly, but Arthur _liked_ to work.

He had just taken a long, unwinding vacation to Fiji and been bored out of his skull the whole time, but told himself that he’d liked reading the collected works of Michael Ondaatje on the beach. He had flown back to the States and the job offer had been waiting for him, and he had taken it because he was vacationed out and also because the other thing waiting for him had been the rumor that Eames was in London with nothing to do, and that meant that Arthur went through his periodic go-surprise-Eames crisis wherein he fantasized thus:

He flew to wherever Eames was said to be and showed up at whatever place Eames happened to be crashing (or broke in, it depended on whether or not Eames was at home). Then he would say something stupid like, _Are you as bored as I am? Can you think of anything we can do to alleviate that?_ And he knew that Eames would suggest something filthy and crude and delicious, because that much was obvious about Eames, and the reason why Arthur never engaged in any of his go-surprise-Eames impulses was because what he knew he would say in response to whatever innuendo Eames threw at him was: _Let’s get a fabulous penthouse somewhere together made entirely of glass so we can see people coming, a shared closet where your awful clothes nestle against my nice ones and maybe my nice ones bleed over onto them and become a good influence, a bed with matching guns under our pillows and we sprawl in it lazily when we’re home on Sunday mornings and I try to do the crossword puzzle and pretend to snap at you for trying to seduce me instead, and a puppy we take with us when we’re on jobs._ And Eames would say in response, staring at him, _Arthur. What the fuck?_

So Arthur didn’t do these things. Arthur took jobs with subpar teams instead.

Arthur bit into an apple while kicked back in his chair reading an entertaining transcript of his mark juggling simultaneous phone calls with two of his clueless mistresses, and that was when the current burner phone vibrated where he’d tossed it on the table next to the laptop.

It shouldn’t have been vibrating. What the hell could they want with him? They had gone out to pick up _lunch_ , for Christ’s sake. Arthur thought it sourly but absently, his eyes still on the transcript as he leaned over to pick the phone up.

And then he frowned. Because he didn’t recognize the number.

Arthur leveled his chair to the floor and put the apple on the table and opened a new e-mail. As he answered the phone, he typed out, _Job’s off_ , because he did not fuck around when his security had been so obviously compromised, and sent it to the team.

And said, “Hello?”

“Artie, dear, how are things?” said the jovial voice on the other end.

It sounded like Eames. Or rather, someone doing a very bad impression of Eames, getting everything just slightly wrong. Arthur fished for the die in his pocket and tossed it on the table. It came up four, and then four again the second time. Not a dream, then. Arthur replaced it and said, “Who’s this?” suspiciously.

“Well, now I’m just offended,” said the voice that sounded like Eames, in Eames’s accent. “It’s Eames, sweetheart.”

It wasn’t, was Arthur’s kneejerk reaction. Because Arthur knew each and every term of endearment Eames had ever called him, and _dear_ and _sweetheart_ didn’t make the list. And never, ever _Artie_ , because Arthur didn’t care if Eames was his weak point, he’d graze a bullet past his weak point’s ear if he’d ever called him _Artie_.

“How did you get this number?” asked Arthur.

“Artie, Artie, Artie, you really do wound me with your low expectations of me.” The odd voice that sounded just like Eames kept talking, while Arthur continued to feel off-kilter with confusion. “I know it isn’t traditional for the forger to be the one doing the rounding-up, but I have got a job for you and I need a point man.”

It sounded like Eames. Exactly like Eames. Except for the odd, wrong things that weren’t Eames at all. But Arthur wasn’t in a dream. So who would call him up pretending to be Eames? This was clearly a trap. “Who’s the extractor?” asked Arthur, trying to spin the conversation out as long as he could.

“None yet. I started at the top, precious. Your choice.”

“You’re one slip of the tongue away from ‘sugarlips,’ you realize,” remarked Arthur.

“I was going to go with ‘honeysuckle’ next,” replied Eames, and at that Arthur _knew_ it was Eames he was talking to, because Arthur would know Eames and his ridiculous, stupid, pointless _banter_ anywhere, which meant that Eames was behaving this way because he was warning him off of something.

Arthur, thoughtful and paying very close attention, put his feet up on the desk next to his forgotten apple and said, casually, “Tell me all about this job, tulip.”

There was a pause, and Arthur could _hear_ Eames struggling not to react to that. It was definitely Eames, and this conversation was definitely being listened to. “The job is in London,” Eames said eventually.

“Doing what?”

“Dreamsharing.”

Arthur almost laughed. Eames was the most ridiculous man he had ever met. “Illuminating,” said Arthur.

“I know, I should have led with that. I hope I haven’t led you astray with this entire conversation. Come to London, dear, and I’ll tell you the rest of it.”

He couldn’t agree too easily, he thought. He didn’t want to raise the suspicions of whoever was listening in. “I am in the middle of something.”

“Tell your tailor you’ll come back later. This is worth your while and, more importantly, _interesting_.”

The thing about this entire conversation was that if Eames had ever called Arthur wanting him on a job, Arthur knew instinctively he would have gotten the full seduction. Eames considered himself devastatingly charming—Arthur would only have admitted he agreed under severe torture—and he would have worked that angle hard. This conversation would have been full of purrs and low licks of phrases, of Eames wrapping Arthur’s name in that accent and making it sound like another word entirely, of the hollow flatteries Arthur knew Eames could concoct with the same ease he dreamed himself entirely different identities, of _darling_ and _love_ and _pet_ and _petal_ and not a single one of the things Eames had called him so far.

Arthur hated himself for how much he wished he’d gotten this conversation without some nameless person somewhere clearly holding a gun to Eames’s head.

“I don’t make decisions about jobs before I know what they entail,” he said.

“Of course,” agreed Eames, and waited.

“So I’d be dropping what I’m doing—”

“You own enough suits, cuddlekins,” said Eames, and Arthur winced.

“ _Eames_. I am not at the tailor.”

“You haven’t take up yoga, have you? Actually, wait, scratch that, _have_ you taken up yoga? I find suddenly that I would support that.”

Arthur ignored him. “And flying all the way out there just because you assure me I’d find the job interesting?”

“Well, of course, Artie,” said Eames. “Don’t you trust me?”

It was the most out-of-place thing to say in the conversation. It wasn’t the type of thing that was said out loud. Because of course Arthur trusted Eames, and vice versa. The thing that people outside of dreamsharing didn’t understand was that it depended heavily on trust. Exploiting other people’s most vulnerable states made you keenly aware of your own. Eames had left himself in Arthur’s hands over and over in the times they’d worked together, trusting him to stand lookout over him when he was defenseless. And Arthur, deep in seventeen different illegal activities, had always trusted Eames to imagine their way out of it.

But that wasn’t the kind of thing you _talked_ about. You didn’t say to your dreamsharing team before you all went under, _I’m trusting you all to be competent and not to stab me in the back._ It was understood. And sometimes the trust was lacking—Arthur was in one of those situations at the moment—and it made for unhappy jobs. The very best dreamsharers got there by having reputations for being trustworthy. And Eames, for all that his natural instinct in life seemed to be to lie, always, in all situations, had an impeccable reputation for being trustworthy in a job.

Although if Arthur was being strictly honest, he’d trusted Eames the first time he’d spoken to him and had thought afterward, _That is the sign of a really excellent forger._

But he heard what Eames was really saying, in this entire odd phone call. _Stay far away from London. Do not get involved. I’m in trouble and you shouldn’t be, too. Trust me._

So Arthur said, “Yes, I trust you, Rupert Eames.” _Message received._

Arthur hung up the burner phone, put it on the floor, and stepped on it.

The rest of his team came bursting into the room, exclamations tumbling over each other.

“What do you mean, ‘job’s off’?” from Hayes.

“Do you know how much money’s at stake?” from Lucy.

“Fuck you, not all of us have a fortune tucked away in off-shore accounts.” From Hayes again.

Arthur shrugged on his coat, straightened the knot of his tie, and said, “Security’s compromised. The job is too risky. You can do it if you like, but you’ll do it with a different point man.” He started to walk out.

Of course they wouldn’t just let him _go_. Idiots. Hayes flew at him and Arthur had to knock an elbow into his throat and then lift his gun to keep Lucy from following after him with her clawing nails.

Lucy’s eyes flashed mutiny at him, but Arthur didn’t care because he was holding the gun and was about to be an ocean away. Lucy wasn’t one for revenge because she couldn’t hold a thought in her head for more than a few seconds; her projections flickered so much they made Arthur dizzy, and he didn’t understand how she had ever gotten into dreamsharing. “So you’re just going to walk away?” she snarled.

Smartest thing she’d ever said, thought Arthur. Which was unkind, perhaps, but Eames had gone and gotten himself in enough trouble that he had called Arthur to _warn him away_ , so Arthur was in an unkind mood. “Exactly. Get another point man. We’re not that far along. You can get it done. I think Mondavi’s available.”

“I don’t get it,” Lucy said, crossing her arms and ignoring the way Hayes was still choking on the floor at their feet. “How have you made it this long if you spook this easily?”

“Mondavi’s available,” Arthur repeated calmly. “And I’m walking away now.”

He tucked his gun back into place. Lucy breathed furiously but didn’t make a move for him, and Arthur walked easily away.

It was a bright, clear day, and Arthur drove himself to the airport and bought three separate tickets under three separate names. Two of them were Eames-provided aliases, which he used out of sentimentality. The third was his own name, which he used to buy the ticket to Heathrow. Because he wasn’t going there to lay low, after all.

***

Arthur never even made it through passport control in Heathrow, but he hadn’t expected to. He had spent the entire flight musing about whatever Eames had gotten himself into. Truthfully, although Eames was an enormous idiot who was almost always getting himself into pointless amounts of trouble, he was also very good at getting himself out of it. The thing about Eames was that he was the most risk-averse conman Arthur had ever met. Eames liked _living_ too much. Which was not to say that Arthur wanted to die, but Arthur also thought if he died young and violently it would serve him right for choosing the career he had. Whereas Eames seemed to think that it would be an epic tragedy for the world to be deprived of him so soon.

Eames was excellent at dreamsharing, at forgery, at stealing things, so Arthur couldn’t imagine a job going wrong on him, and anyway dreamsharing was a small world and people knew he knew Eames and would have given him word about that. So Arthur mused about Eames’s other hobbies. Eames was a terrible gambler, but he was good at cheating every once in a while to keep his head above water, so it was unlikely to be a gambling debt gone bad. And he had a habit of leaving behind a trail of romantic conquests, but Arthur had not yet seen a single one complain, which always made Arthur conclude that Eames was both fantastic in bed and also annoying outside of bed. And somehow Eames was charming enough that he always seemed to elude the significant others of his conquests as well.

Not that it made any sense for a love affair gone wrong to insist that Eames call Arthur for help. Because that was clearly what was going on. If Eames had needed—or wanted—Arthur’s help, he would have called him and he would have asked for it. Arthur was fairly confident of that, fairly confident that Eames would have been straightforward about it, even if he didn’t know how guaranteed that help would have been. Eames hadn’t wanted to get Arthur involved. That was what every strange oddity about the conversation had been about: _I’m saying one thing to you, but I’m meaning something else entirely._

So whatever it was that had happened to Eames, the object of the whole thing had been to get to _Arthur_. Which made Arthur somehow responsible for this whole thing, in a strange way that made him feel fidgety, anxious for the gun he’d been unable to smuggle on the plane with him. Who would have known that the way to get to Arthur was through Eames? How many people in the universe knew that? Arthur would have wagered none. Possibly Dom, who knew Arthur very well and had noticed his chattering overeagerness around Eames during the second job, before Arthur had clamped down on it. But he didn’t think Dom would have pegged it as the crush that it was.

More frighteningly, it was someone who had known enough to get to Eames _and_ had known the number of Arthur’s latest burner phone. Who the _hell_ would have known both of those facts? Arthur couldn’t come up with an answer other than _someone very not good_ who had cornered Eames sufficiently for Eames to cave and call him while desperately warning him off. Eames wasn’t terribly protective by nature. Eames had once given him a empty gun to defend himself without telling him it had no bullets in it ( _It’s all in your head, love—you thought you had bullets in the gun, so it was the same as having bullets in the gun._ Eames had been very unconvinced by Arthur’s teeth-gritted assertion that it was _definitely not the same_ ). So if Eames was suddenly warning him off of something then he was genuinely worried in a way that alarmed Arthur.

So, having pulled together all of the facts, Arthur concluded that he wasn’t going to make it through passport control, that he was never going to get the opportunity to retrieve his gun from his checked luggage, and that Eames had better damn well appreciate all of this trouble he was going to on his behalf.

Arthur didn’t even lift an eyebrow when he was pulled aside. He let himself be frisked without a word of protest. Then he was shown into a sleek black car that pulled neatly away from Heathrow and into traffic.

Arthur had been to London before, but he’d been most places before, and he was terrible at remembering them. His world was a constant whir of changing meeting places in interchangeable locales and dreamscapes that he had to memorize and then discard by the next job. Keeping in mind shadow locations, layouts of other places, was dangerous when you were in a brand new dream and needed to know exactly where you were going next, so Arthur only remembered the place he had to remember at that moment. He didn’t remember London. So he spent much of the drive alternating between curiously watching out the window and searching the deserted back seat for something he could use as a weapon.

He came up empty on the weapon front by the time the car drew to a stop. By his guess, they were somewhere in central London. It was very busy, and all the buildings were tall, new, modern, glass. It was architecture Arthur liked, all clean, unfussy lines and well-utilized space, but Arthur barely registered it as he was led by his escorts through a lobby to an elevator. He was busy trying to plot out the place’s escape routes. He didn’t have much of a plan at present, because he didn’t know enough about what was going on, but he was taking copious notes in his head about everything. As soon as he got a moment alone, he was going to fill pages of his Moleskine with his observations, relieved that they’d let him keep it.

The elevator opened directly onto a fancy marble vestibule. Arthur took the hint he got from his escorts and stepped out. Off to his left was a sunken living room surrounded by floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over a to-die-for London view.

And Eames, dressed in one of those painful shirts he insisted on wearing and a wrinkled pair of pants, sat up from where he’d been lounging on the couch, spotted him, and said flatly, “I am going to fucking kill you.”

Behind Arthur his escorts, apparently unconcerned about this threat, closed the elevator door.

***

Eames had been held captive before. It generally involved being tied to some unpleasant chair, and his hands would fall asleep from cut-off circulation and his wrists would chafe against the binding, and Eames would be bored to tears waiting for whoever was holding him to make some sort of mistake. Which they always did, because there was no reason to hold Eames captive except because you were stupid, and so Eames usually benefitted from having really epically idiotic enemies.

Eames had never been held captive like this. It was a ridiculously posh hotel suite that he wouldn’t have sprung for, not even in his most flush moments. And it was alarming as fuck, because his clothes were in the wardrobe. Everything he owned, as far as he could tell. Which, granted, wasn’t much, because Eames’s life motto was _travel light, live lighter_. But still, Eames didn’t like the fact that most of his worldly possessions were there. It was…creepy. To give it the mildest adjective he could.

He also didn’t really like that they’d given him back his wallet and his poker chip, almost with a smirk, as if they enjoyed how powerless he would still be, even with everything he could want. They didn’t give him his mobile or his gun, and Eames liked that that at least was a concession to the fact that they thought he could do _something_ to get away. The phone in the suite was also dead, and Eames spent a little while looking at it and wishing he knew enough about anything like that to try to fix it.

It was late by the time he’d been deposited in the hotel suite, and seeing nothing else for it, Eames ate some of the fruit that had been left in the room, cracked open the bottle of welcoming champagne, and drank himself to sleep while watching _EastEnders_.

When morning came, he decided to give some thought as to what the hell he was going to do. He couldn’t tell if he’d fooled Three-Piece-Suit-Government-Man with his ridiculous conversation with Arthur, but he thought he’d at least bought himself a day until Three-Piece-Suit-Government-Man realized that he’d warned Arthur to go to ground and avoid London at all costs. Once that was discovered, Eames contemplated what he ought to do. Clearly this man wanted some kind of extraction done. Eames could do an extraction. He didn’t like that he was being kidnapped into doing it, but he’d get it done if he had to. And then he’d be on his way. Definitely.

There was an entire television channel in this hotel, whatever the hotel was, showing nothing but Korean dramas, and Eames found himself embarrassingly sucked in, so he had no idea how late in the morning it was when the elevator dinged open.

He groaned internally, because to be honest he’d been rather enjoying this impromptu holiday he was on here, and he lifted himself up, and there was Arthur in his hotel suite, in one of his stupid three-piece suits.

Eames stared at him. “I am going to fucking kill you,” he said.

“Whatever,” said Arthur, clearly not taking his threat seriously and walking into the suite, down the step. “Are you hurt?”

“Am I what?” asked Eames, blinking at him.

Arthur walked over to the windows and looked out them, up and down the view of the Thames. “Are you, I don’t know, hurt? Dying? Or something?” Arthur turned and made an awkward gesture with his hand that Eames supposed was Arthur-speak for _I am concerned for your well-being._

“Yes,” said Eames. “I’m dying. I’ve holed myself up in this ridiculous hotel suite because I’m dying.”

“Well, how am I supposed to know?” Arthur settled his hands in his pockets. “To call me up and call me Artie made me assume you had some sort of death wish.”

“ _You_ have the death wish,” Eames retorted. “Can you not understand a simple code? Was it not mathematical enough for your brain to comprehend? You were supposed to go _anywhere but London_.”

“You told me to come to London to see you.”

“Oh my _God_ ,” said Eames, and collapsed backward onto the sofa. “You cannot possibly be that idiotic. Are you that idiotic? You’ve been getting by this whole time on the fact that you look good in a suit, haven’t you?”

“Relax.” Arthur wandered away from the window, into Eames’s eyeline. “I got your message, and it was a stupid one, so I did the opposite of your message, which I’ve generally found to be the right thing to do, doing the opposite of what you say.”

Eames looked at him morosely. “I am seriously going to fucking kill you.”

“You seem fine,” remarked Arthur.

“I am being held hostage.”

Arthur glanced around them. “Could be worse. Is there anything pressing happening right now?”

“Yes. Two very pressing things. The first is my discovering that you are the world’s most idiotic person. The second is that now I’ve missed what Choi Young did to upset Yoo Eun Soo this time.” He gestured to the television.

Arthur glanced at it, then said, “Okay, you seem to have things under control here, so I’m going to take a nap, because I am jetlagged and exhausted and if I’m going to save your ass, I need some sleep.”

Eames watched him walk into the bedroom and called, “My arse doesn’t need saving.”

“No, you’re doing great in your hotel suite prison with your Asian soap operas,” Arthur called back and then walked back out into the living room. “Did you sleep in that bed last night?”

“No, I slept on the floor, but when I woke up this morning I kicked all of the blankets and sheets around on the bed just to throw people off, keep them on their toes.”

“You couldn’t have _made_ it?” complained Arthur.

“Arthur. Darling. I’m still getting used to this new stupidity of yours, so I’m afraid I neglected to tell you this, but: This is a hotel.”

“Go to hell,” muttered Arthur, and dragged himself over to the other couch in the living room.

“Why would I make the bed in a _hotel_? Actually, what makes you think I ever make my bed? Do you make your bed? Of course you make your bed. You probably iron your bloody sheets, don’t you?”

“Do you ever stop talking?” Arthur asked sleepily, now curled on the couch, back facing Eames.

Eames stared at him. “Are you just going to go to sleep like that?”

“Like what?”

“Wearing a suit?”

“Yes.”

Eames paused. “You can sleep in the bed, you know.”

“I’m not sleeping in your unmade bed, it’s disgusting,” sulked Arthur.

“Suddenly you’re fussy about where you sleep?”

“I’m not fussy about where I sleep when I sleep for a job. When I sleep for me? Yes, I’m fussy about where I sleep.”

Eames sighed, and he told himself he was sighing because he was _so annoyed_ that Arthur was there, but actually it was kind of nice to have Arthur curled up on the other couch. It was almost homey. They never sat around watching television together when they were on jobs; they just worked all the time. Eames had seen Arthur sleep lots of times, but never _normal_ sleep. This whole thing was novel and surprisingly nice.

And Arthur would have ideas about their predicament. Or at least say skeptical, condescending things about Eames’s ideas. Eames was weirdly looking forward to that.

Eames tried to pay attention to his Korean drama that he had been so fixated on, but Arthur’s presence was incredibly distracting and eventually Eames said, “No, but seriously: Why are you here?”

He’d thought Arthur was sleeping, so he didn’t expect an answer, but he got one anyway. “You called me,” he said.

***  
Eames got the duvet from the bed and tossed it over Arthur because that was just the sort of nice bloke he was, no need to read anything into that whatsoever. Halfway through the next episode of the Korean drama the elevator dinged and Eames sat up and luggage was thrust into the vestibule and then the elevator left again. Eames recognized Arthur’s nondescript luggage and settled himself back down onto the couch and checked his watch and wondered how long he should let Arthur sleep. He decided just long enough to let his body clock reset a bit. Dreamsharers were used to wonky body clocks; Arthur would be fine with a bit of a catnap. And Eames was getting hungry and therefore nervous, because it reminded him that he and Arthur were not on holiday together, they were being held prisoner for some reason that neither of them knew.

So Eames gave Arthur ninety minutes and then walked over to his couch and knelt beside it and considered the best way to wake him. He was facing out now, and he looked rumpled and surprisingly innocent, not at all like the man Eames had watched coolly break someone’s nose when they had been tracked down by an unjustifiably disgruntled client. Eames had always suspected that Arthur was younger than he looked, that part of the reason he was always dressed so stiffly and kept his hair so ruthlessly slicked back was to give the impression of age and maturity. Looking at him asleep, with his hair tumbling forward onto his forehead, Eames saw why he did it.

“Hey,” Eames whispered, and Arthur didn’t stir. “Psst!” Arthur snuffled but didn’t wake. Eames wondered abruptly if he was dreaming, hated to interrupt a dream if he was having one. He paused, hesitating, but Arthur frowned in his sleep, and if Arthur was dreaming, it wasn’t a good one, Eames decided.

“Arthur,” he said, keeping his voice low, and reached out a hand to nudge at Arthur’s shoulder.

Arthur moved with electric quickness for someone who Eames knew had just been asleep, pinning Eames’s arm back painfully with one hand while his other hand flailed for a gun that was nowhere near.

“It’s me, it’s me, it’s me,” Eames protested, and Arthur let go of his arm. “Ow,” he said, flexing his fingers experimentally.

“Sorry,” said Arthur, pushing his hair off his forehead. “You shouldn’t do that.”

“Wake you up? Christ, you must be an utter joy to sleep with.”

Arthur blinked dark eyes at him and said nothing, which unaccountably made Eames hate him.

“I didn’t want you to sleep anymore,” Eames said. “You’ll throw off your adjustment to this time zone.”

Arthur lifted his eyebrows to say he knew how stupid that sounded.

“Plus,” Eames went on, “I thought you were here to work.”

“Right. The Save Eames’s Ass job,” said Arthur, and sat up and pushed away the duvet and yawned and scrubbed his hand over his face and pushed his hair back again, although it immediately fell back forward.

Eames stared at him, because Arthur had never, ever, ever woken up from a dreamshare like this. Arthur woke up from dreamshares put together and unmistakably _Arthur_. Eames didn’t know what to do with this yawning bundle of cozy _adorableness_.

Wrong. He knew exactly what to do with it. It involved seeing how sleepily Arthur would kiss back, how pliant he would be if Eames leaned forward at just that moment, how soft and sleep-warm his skin would taste except for the bite of the stubble across his cheeks and chin. Eames had never seen Arthur so _not sharp_ in his entire life. He wondered if he was always like this when he wasn’t working, if the people who got to know Arthur outside of a professional capacity knew him like this, and how those people got to be this _lucky_? Suddenly Eames thought being hit by a mysterious black car was the best thing that had ever happened to him, because somehow it had led to this moment of seeing this particular side of Arthur.

Arthur seemed oblivious to the tangle of Eames’s thoughts. Arthur scrubbed a thoughtful hand over his face and said, “Do you have, like, a decent razor? I’ve never understood what it is you do to maintain exactly that concentrated level of rakish stubble.”

“I’m just naturally dashing,” Eames managed, making room so Arthur could stand.

Arthur stretched. His tie was askew. Eames stared at Arthur’s _askew tie_. Eames loved when Arthur’s ties were askew. He considered it the sexiest thing he’d ever seen. Arthur with an askew tie was like any other person completely and utterly naked. Eames’s mouth was literally watering.

Arthur tugged at his waistcoat to straighten it and said, “Odds you have anything here that would even halfway fit me? I’m dying for a shower.”

“Oh,” Eames remembered abruptly. “Your luggage is here.”

“What?” Arthur turned instinctively toward the vestibule, and then he smiled. He lit up at the sight of his _luggage_. His luggage provoked _dimples_. Eames had never been jealous of a stupid sodding _suitcase_ before. Arthur made the filthiest, most obscene noise of pleased delight and practically bloody skipped his way over to his things. “When did they bring this? I slept through it?” Arthur patted his suitcase fondly and lingeringly, almost a fucking caress, and Eames felt all sorts of irrational jealousy and thought that he might actually throw Arthur’s luggage out a window if he could manage to open one of them.

“It wasn’t an event,” said Eames, making himself stand and behave like a halfway-normal person. “They just shoved it off the lift.”

“I’m going to take a shower,” Arthur proclaimed, slinging one bag over his shoulder and pulling the other one after him into the lounge area. “Here’s what you’re going to do.”

Eames lifted his eyebrows. “You’re giving me homework?”

“Of course I’m giving you homework.” Arthur tucked his hand into his suit coat.

“Once a point man,” said Eames.

Arthur ignored him. He pulled out one of those little notebooks he was taking constant notes in, and a pencil to go along with it, and handed them both to Eames.

“ _Arthur_ ,” said Eames. “Your _diary_? You can’t mean this, darling. You’ll regret it. You’re not thinking clearly.”

“I want you to write down everything that’s happened so far, every detail.”

Eames was busy sitting on the floor with his back against the couch, looking with fascination at Arthur’s crowded handwriting. “It _says_ things. I always thought it would just say ‘Arthur Cobb’ over and over again with little hearts.”

Arthur sighed heavily. “I don’t know why I’m here.”

“That makes two of us,” Eames rejoined. “But no, it actually _says things_. Things other than ‘Everyone around me is an idiot. I am the only intelligent person to have ever existed on the planet. Eames is so very fit; I adore those beautiful shirts he wears.’”

“If you get tired of listening to the sound of your voice,” said Arthur, heading toward the bedroom with his luggage, “feel free to branch out of character and do something _actually useful_.”

“I shall write down everything I know,” Eames assured him, “with _specificity_.”

Arthur paused on the threshold of the bedroom, looked back at him, and narrowed his eyes. Eames smiled with the innocent sunniness he knew he’d perfected.

Then Arthur sighed and scowled and disappeared into the bedroom. With both pieces of luggage. Damn it, Eames had been intending to spend Arthur’s shower searching through his luggage so he could see what about it made Arthur go into the paroxysms of pleasure that other men reserved for blowjobs.

“You need to bring both pieces of your luggage into the bathroom with you?” Eames called to him.

“Yes!” Arthur called back, and Eames heard the bathroom door close and then lock.

“Did you honestly just lock the bathroom door?” Eames shouted, offended.

“Once a thief, Mr. Eames!” Arthur shouted back, and then the shower turned on.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter underwent a *major* re-write this week and I think it's much, much better as a result so even more thanks than usual to knackorcraft, who rasied the issue first, and arctacuda, who helped me see my way to fixing it.

Chapter 3  
Arthur emerged from the shower put back into Arthur mode, freshly shaved, hair slicked back. He wasn’t wearing a suit, but he was still wearing a tie, with a lightweight jumper pulled over his Oxford and his sleeves rolled up. This, Eames knew, counted as dressed-down for Arthur.

Eames had spent the shower trying not to fantasize about Arthur. He read through some of Arthur’s notes to himself, not sure when he would ever get the chance to do this again. Arthur clearly had had a series of these notebooks in his past, because this one had only a few pages full and was all about some job Eames had never heard of. The job, Eames supposed, Arthur had been in the middle of when Eames had called him. Arthur’s notes were astonishingly dense, a combination of fact and speculation, Arthur’s missives to his own brain, and Eames was _fascinated_. It actually had distracted him very nicely from naked Arthur a few yards away.

When the shower shut off and Eames realized he’d spent the entire time reading instead of writing, he quickly skipped to the end and put the pencil to paper and tried to imitate Arthur’s efficient, informative notes. It was a massive failure. Eames was suddenly aware that he was unconsciously forging Arthur’s handwriting, and he erased it all furiously and started over, but the problem with being an inveterate forger was eventually you forgot how to write like _you_. And anyway, Eames was also self-conscious about his terrible spelling, so he wrote a couple of useless notes— _black car, three-piece suit, government, files_ —and then settled for sketching instead. A very accurate sketch of Three-Piece-Suit-Government-Man, if he did say so himself.

“Feel better?” Eames asked as Arthur pulled a chair out at the table with him.

“Yes. Is there food?”

“Grapes from yesterday, but they’re not looking great. I’m hoping we haven’t been forgotten.”

“Really? Because I’m hoping we have been and then we can break our way out of this place.”

“You have ideas about breaking out of this place?”

“Of course. I’d fix the phone lines and call for help.”

Eames lifted an eyebrow. “You can fix the broken phone lines?”

Arthur gave him a look that said, _You can’t?_. “What happens when you call for the elevator?” 

“Absolutely nothing. They must have it shut down somewhere.” 

“Then I’d fix that, too. How far did you get with the notes?”

He had got nowhere with the notes, so he said instead, “You know you don’t have to do it with me.”

“Do what?” asked Arthur.

Eames gestured to him. “The whole Arthur thing.”

Arthur looked confused, glanced down at himself. “The whole…what?”

“The whole persona.” Eames was frustrated. How to say _You don’t have to convince me you’re clever and capable, I already know_ without saying that and sounding like an idiot?

Arthur leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms and said flatly, “You think I’m a persona?”

Clearly this was doing no good at all. “I’m just saying I can disrespect you just as easily if your hair is curling as I already do when it’s not.”

Arthur’s expression was inscrutable as he gazed at him. “I’ll keep that in mind next time I’m dressing myself. Because, as we all know, I shape my appearance based upon _you_.”

“Never mind,” said Eames, on a sigh, and pushed the notebook over to Arthur. “I am terrible with notes.”

Arthur flipped to Eames’s page and lifted his eyebrows as he read. “I’m not going to argue with you on that. It’s a good drawing though.”

“That’s the man.”

Arthur closed the notebook. “Start from the beginning.”

So Eames told Arthur about the black car tailing him, and how he’d been unable to determine who it might be, so he stepped in front of it.

“You _stepped_ in _front_ of it,” Arthur repeated.

“Yes. And then it hit me,” said Eames, still offended by that.

“You _stepped_ in _front_ of it and it _hit_ you. Sometimes I think I would feel better about you if I knew that you took actual drugs.”

“Please don’t feel the need to be nice to me, petal, we know I can handle your true feelings.”

“What did you think was going to happen once you stepped in front of a car? It wasn’t a _dream_ , Eames. Of course it was going to hit you.”

“It didn’t have to hit me so _hard_.”

Arthur closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead as if talking to Eames had given him an actual headache. “Jesus Christ,” he mumbled, and then he opened his eyes and took a deep breath and said with exaggerated patience, “And what happened next?”

So then Eames told him all about waking up in the weird, windowless hospital and the three-piece-suit government man and Eames finished with, “Have you ever thought about carrying an umbrella?”

“No,” said Arthur. “They took your totem?”

“Yes.”

“They knew it was a totem.”

“I have no idea. They took everything out of my pockets.”

“That was for show. They didn’t need to. They could have just taken your gun. They took everything, including stuff that wasn’t dangerous. Because they were trying to make sure they took your totem. Did you get it back?”

Eames nodded. “Everything but the gun back. And my mobile.”

“So they know about dreamsharing.”

“Of course they know about dreamsharing, Arthur, they’re government.”

“But I mean, they know enough to know about totems.”

“I’m sure they have an advanced dreamsharing program here.”

“Then why do they need us?”

“I have no idea.”

“Well, what did he say?”

“Not much. That he needed a forger for a sensitive, government job. That I would be able to pick my team.”

“And you chose me?”

“Of course I didn’t choose you,” Eames snapped.

Arthur lifted his eyebrows.

“Arthur, darling,” Eames said, “do you think this sounds like a good job?”

“I think it sounds like a terrible job.”

“Then why do you think I would ever have called you?”

“Because you need the fucking best to get out of this alive, and that’s me.”

“Never let it be said that you don’t read your own press,” remarked Eames.

“You’re an idiot,” Arthur told him. “I should have been your very first call.”

“I don’t even have your _number_ , pet.”

“You have multiple numbers for me,” Arthur pointed out.

“Do you actually keep those burner phones? That defeats the purpose of having a burner phone, love.”

“Never mind,” Arthur said. “If you weren’t going to call me, why did you call me?”

“Because he wants you. He must read your press, too.”

“What did he do to get you to call me?” Arthur asked, his eyes sharp.

Eames considered. He said, taking a deep breath, “So.”

“Oh, fucking Christ, I need a drink,” said Arthur.

“You don’t even know what I’m going to say!” Eames protested.

“No good speech from you has ever started with the word ‘so.’”

“How do good speeches from me start?”

“I haven’t heard one yet. When I hear one, I’ll let you know.”

“There is a possibility, darling, that I am not entirely law-abiding.”

“Is this supposed to be news to me?”

“There is also a possibility that the British government has doctored files to blame all of my indiscretions on…you.”

Arthur stared at him. Then he lifted a hand and pointed at him and said, “If I do a single minute of time for any of your ridiculous petty crimes, I will fucking hunt you down and take you into a dream and draw and quarter you, do you understand me?”

“I’m not going to let you get in trouble for my crimes, Arthur. That’s why I called you. To tell you _not to come to London_. Which I thought you understood, because then you used my first name, which, I have to ask you, how do you know?”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Eames, ‘Rupert’ isn’t your first name, it’s what you’ve _planted_ as your first name to see how close the rest of us are getting to the truth about you, and if you think I don’t know that, then I am alarmed at how severely you’ve underestimated me. I do know your actual first name, of course, I’m just saving it to use on a very important occasion.”

Eames regarded Arthur and realized he had no idea if he was lying or not. “You’re bluffing,” he said.

Arthur half-smiled, a ghost of the dimples showing. Eames supposed he was no long-lost piece of luggage but that look at least was something. “This is why I don’t lose at poker and you do,” Arthur said. “So your mysterious government man is planning some kind of extraction. Why doesn’t he go out and get an extractor? Why start with a forger?”

“I have no idea. Because I was here so I was the easiest to grab?”

“Because you’re the only dreamsharer on the entire planet stupid enough to step in front of a car that was tailing him?” suggested Arthur, tipping back on his chair in that way he had.

Eames childishly wished he had something nearby that he could throw at Arthur’s head. He wasn’t at the right angle to kick Arthur over.

Arthur twirled his pencil about in his hand and mused out the window at London and said, “Did he ever give you a name?”

“Mycroft, which is obviously fake.”

Arthur snorted, still looking out the window. “His name being Mycroft is about as likely as your name being Rupert.”

“So what’s the plan, pet?” Eames asked.

Arthur looked back at him. “We’ll do the job. How dangerous can it possibly be? I find it difficult to believe we haven’t been through worse.” Arthur shrugged.

"And if us doing the job results in World War III?”

“Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it,” Arthur said, and scribbled in his notebook. Eames imagined he was writing: _Try not to start WWIII_.

“He knew you would come,” Eames found himself saying, watching Arthur write.

Arthur made a quizzical little noise, not looking up.

“He knew, the minute I rang you. It didn’t matter what I said to you, he was so bloody confident you would come. And he was right. And I don’t understand why.”

“Eames,” said Arthur, and he sounded almost pitying as he looked at him. “What kind of people have you been working with that you think I would ever have just left you to handle whatever trouble you’d gotten into on your own?”

“You’re too good for your own good,” Eames told him. “Your loyalty’s going to get you killed.”

“We both know that loyalty keeps you alive.”

Eames wanted to say that was true only to a point. He wanted to say, _Sometimes I worry about you, because you do stupid things like trust a man who’s having a nervous breakdown or fly to the side of a conman being held by a secret government operative_. But he didn’t. Because Eames wasn’t going to let Arthur’s loyalty to _him_ be the thing that killed him. Whatever “Mycroft” wanted, Eames was going to find some way to get Arthur out of this equation.

***

Mycroft had a long list of very important things he needed to do and he resented the fact that Moriarty’s presence in his life meant that one of those things was “visit the two criminals you are holding hostage in an expensive London hotel.” He thought he was being very nice with the London hotel thing, frankly. He could have just thrown them in a holding room somewhere, but he thought they might be more likely to cooperate quickly if they felt somewhat respected. And Mycroft didn’t want to invest more energy into this whole disastrous situation than he already was. 

The fact that he could have got them a hotel suite with two bedrooms and instead had chosen to force them together into a hotel suite with one bedroom merely meant that he was growing far too used to the idea of having to add match-making to his repertoire. The number of new things Mycroft was having to waste time developing inimitable talent for because of his brother: negotiating with criminal dreamsharers, learning how to manipulate two men whose weak spots were each the other, et cetera. 

Both of his criminal dreamsharers were sitting at the table in the dining area of the suite when he stepped off of the lift, and they both looked up at him. Eames was wearing something garish, as usual. Arthur was exactly as Mycroft’s intelligent had led him to believe he would be: impeccably put-together. 

“Welcome to England,” Mycroft said to Arthur. 

Arthur tipped back in his chair and said, laconically, “Hi.”

“Don’t mind him,” said Eames. “That’s effusive for Arthur.”

Mycroft smiled at them, because his strategy was to try to relax them and not make this a battle the whole way, and said, “Shall we?”

Arthur leveled his chair to the floor. 

Eames said, “I’ve been watching this Korean drama; I’m going to be heartbroken if I don’t get to finish it.”

Mycroft thought Eames was annoying. Mycroft was, honestly, looking forward to Arthur deciding to take the lead on this situation. Which Mycroft predicted he would, because Arthur was clearly the controlling type. Mycroft respected controlling types. Mycroft thought Arthur was going to make this entire situation much easier because Arthur would be pragmatic and just get things done instead of being tiresomely _flashy_ about everything the way Eames was. 

So Mycroft grit his teeth to keep himself from snapping. He wanted Arthur to relax and decide to work with him, not to get his hackles up because Mycroft had been rude to Arthur’s obvious and also oblivious object of his overly protective affections. Mycroft merely said, “But I believe, Mr. Eames, that you said you desired a, quote, nice piece of steak.”

Eames, after a pause, looked at Arthur and said, “I do kind of want a steak.”

And then Mycroft’s mobile vibrated. Mycroft sighed and looked at it and frowned as it blinked _Sherlock_ up at him. “Excuse me,” he said, because Sherlock never rang. 

“By all means,” said Eames. “We’ve nothing better to do, of course, but wait for you.” 

Mycroft ignored him, stepping a few steps back into the lift lobby and answering the phone. “Yes?” 

“Hello, brother dear!” exclaimed Sherlock effusively on the other end. “How _are_ you?” 

Mycroft narrowed his eyes, even though Sherlock wasn’t there to see and be properly cowed by the action. “What do you want?” 

“How is the government doing these days?” asked Sherlock, still syrupy sweet. “Ticking along? All wars under control?” 

“I’m in the middle of something,” Mycroft said, glancing over his shoulder. Eames was listening raptly. Arthur was scribbling in a notebook. 

“Oh, yes, of course, no doubt, probably something very important.” 

_Convincing criminals to deal with your dangerous nemesis for me_ , thought Mycroft, and didn’t say. “Get to the point, Sherlock.” 

“Baskerville,” said Sherlock, his voice immediately switching to his usual clipped tones. 

And Mycroft sighed. 

***

“Do you have a plan?” Eames asked Arthur in a low voice, not taking his eyes off of Mycroft, who was muttering into his phone something that sounded like, “Still with Baskerville? I thought I told you to—”

“My plan is to let him buy us some very expensive steak and tell us exactly what it is he wants because I don’t have enough information to develop another plan,” said Arthur. 

Eames glanced at him. He hadn’t looked up from the notebook, where he was steadily writing. 

Mycroft in the lift lobby was saying, “Twenty-four hours? Why could you possibly need that long?” 

“What are you writing?” Eames asked Arthur. 

“Transcribing what he’s saying,” Arthur murmured. 

Eames craned his neck to see into Arthur’s notebook and said, “You bloody know shorthand. I’m not even surprised by that. Is there anything you don’t know?” 

“No,” answered Arthur. 

Mycroft said, “Regardless of what you may think, I don’t just have Baskerville at my disposal.” 

“Well,” amended Arthur, “I don’t know what Baskerville is. Do you?” 

“No, but I bet it’s Mycroft’s ancestral estate. We have those things here in England.” 

“Thank you for the education on all things British, because it’s not like I’ve ever read Jane Austen.” 

“Austen’s a curious choice, I thought you’d try to convince me you were a Trollope fan.” 

“I thought you wouldn’t know who Trollope is,” Arthur rejoined, still steadily writing. 

Mycroft said, “No, I will not do it out of ‘brotherly regard.’ What do I get in exchange?” 

Eames said, “I’m offended. Write in your little notebook there that I’m offended.”

“Did you have to forge an English professor at some point?” Arthur asked. 

Mycroft in the lift lobby said, “And you have to go home for Christmas for the next ten years.” 

“Still offended,” Eames told Arthur. “And I shagged one.”

“Of course you did,” said Arthur. 

“He used to recite Byron and Keats and Shelley in bed.”

“Not John Donne?” asked Arthur. 

Mycroft said, “Fine, make it five years, then, but you must take Mummy and Daddy to the theater the next time they come to London. Their choice of play. _Or musical_.” 

Eames looked at Arthur in honest delight, because he couldn’t remember ever having a conversation when he and Arthur talked _literature_ like this, even obliquely. He tried to remember if they’d ever had a conversation that had been something other than work-related or Arthur fending off Eames’s flirtations. Eames thought that Arthur had never let him into his head as much as he was right now and Eames almost wanted to hold his breath lest Arthur come to his senses and shut him back out again. 

Eames cast around for something to say and decided to continue in the vein of good-natured teasing, because he thought anything else would startle Arthur. “Petal,” he said, “this is a lovely surprise. I never dreamed you’d be so well-read. I thought you’d consider it all too frivolous for your practical, plan-centric mind.” 

“Just because I’m _responsible_ and _grown-up_ and keep everyone focused when we have a job to do doesn’t mean I don’t like things that aren’t dreamsharing,” Arthur said, casually, as if this was not an astonishing assertion for him to be telling Eames. And then he impossibly went on: “For all you know, Mr. Eames, I have the soul of a poet and have just been hiding it very well.” 

This was a possibility so dangerously seductive that Eames actually felt his breath catch a little bit. Which wasn’t helped when Arthur looked up at him and tipped one half of his mouth into enough of a smile that a brief, tantalizing dimple appeared. Eames had the amazing thought that he didn’t think he had ever felt so wrapped in intimacy with Arthur as he did at this moment. 

Then Mycroft ruined it. “Very sorry,” he said as he came back over to them. “Couldn’t be helped.” 

“What’s Baskerville?” Arthur asked him, immediately shifting back into no-nonsense work mode and taking his eyes off of Eames, and Eames hated Mycroft’s timing. 

Mycroft said, mildly, “I can always change my mind about the offer of steak.”

It wasn’t like he was going to get Arthur back into the moment they’d just had anyway, and Eames really did want a steak, so he stood and remarked to Mycroft, “Brothers can be such trouble, can’t they? At least, that’s how it has always appeared from my only-child vantage point.” 

Mycroft did not look amused by him, but Eames was used to that from men in three-piece suits, he reflected, a bit self-pityingly. 

Arthur also stood and said, even though he was wearing a bloody tie, “Are we underdressed?”

Eames rolled his eyes and prepared to protest any change of clothing.

But Mycroft merely said, “You’ll do,” and walked onto the lift.

Eames glanced over at Arthur, who unnecessarily fixed the knot in his tie, looking toward the elevator, and tucked his notebook and pencil into his pocket. He looked so very Arthurian, ready to go into battle and get done what needed to be done, and Eames felt a little helpless in the face of that, in the face of _him_ , _there_ , when he had no reason to be. 

Eames began, “Arthur—” and he didn’t really know what he was going to say next, but he wanted it to be something like, _I’ll create a distraction, and you run and get out of this mess._

Arthur took a step closer to him, far closer to him than he usually stood, which shut Eames up immediately. He ducked his head and spoke directly into Eames’s ear, and Eames tried to pretend he didn’t reflexively close his eyes at that. “We’re doing this together. You do anything to try to cut me out of this and I’ll turn myself in to the nearest authorities for all of your colorful crimes.”

“You are so astonishingly stupid,” Eames said, and he meant to say it harshly but instead it came out breathy and soft.

Arthur took a step away from him, straightening, and said, “Let’s go,” as if he hadn’t just been murmuring into Eames’s ear, and Eames closed his hand around the poker chip in his pocket and followed.


	4. Chapter 4

Chapter 4

Arthur stood silent in the elevator. Their mysterious contact who claimed to be called Mycroft stood calmly silent as well, watching the buttons light up in descending order. Eames stood silent, too, one hand in his pocket, no doubt closed around his totem, because Eames had the habit shared by many dreamsharers of relying on his totem like a security blanket. He stood a hair closer to Arthur than under normal circumstances, but the slight warm brush of him was comforting, and anyway, no matter what was happening, Arthur would probably never have pushed Eames away from him. He was more than willing to let Eames crowd him a bit if it made Eames feel more like they had a numerical advantage. 

Arthur had been wondering where they would be transported to, so it was very disappointing when Mycroft merely led them to the hotel’s restaurant. It was an upscale place, crowded with businessmen talking in a low murmur. Or maybe they were all just secret government operatives. For all Arthur knew, England was an extremely sketchy place. It had, after all, given birth to Eames. 

They sat at the table and Mycroft said smoothly, straightening his napkin over his lap, “Is there any objection to a bottle of Merlot?” 

Arthur shook his head. 

Eames said, because of course he would, “I was hoping for some kind of terrible American light beer. No? No chance of that?”

The waiter and Mycroft both stared at him as if they did not think he was amusing. Arthur was keeping a mental list of Things Eames Said During Dinner That He Shouldn’t Have Said. 

Finally Mycroft smiled, distinctly unamused, and said, “How will you take your steak?”

“Rare,” Eames said. “Bloody.”

Arthur almost rolled his eyes and said politely, “Medium, please.”

“The same,” Mycroft agreed, and then the waiter scurried away. Mycroft leveled steady gray eyes on Arthur. He had a chess player’s eyes, thought Arthur. No need to bluff: it was all strategy, right there on the table, only no one was ever clever enough to see it. 

Arthur had always hated chess. It took far too long to play, and anyway, not enough _happened_ during it. 

“I trust you had a pleasant flight, Mister—” Mycroft remarked finally. 

“Arthur,” Arthur corrected him, because he had taken the opposite approach of Eames and worked hard to keep his last name out of things. “And it was fine.” 

“A first-name basis already,” said Mycroft. 

“Arthur is friendlier than I am, ask anyone, they’ll tell you,” said Eames, sounding playful. 

Arthur marveled at Eames’s ability to continue to tease him while also confronting their kidnapper. Arthur supposed Eames was a multitasker if ever there was one. 

“I am Mycroft,” Mycroft offered. 

Arthur refused to say it was nice to meet him, because it wasn’t, so an awkward silence stretched open. 

“Arthur doesn’t do small talk,” said Eames. “He is much too important for such things.” 

Which made Arthur bristle a little bit. “I don’t do small talk with people who are currently holding me prisoner.” 

“How very gauche of you to say, Arthur. I’m sure we could leave at any time.” Eames looked across at Mycroft challengingly. 

Mycroft looked evenly back at them. 

The waiter arrived with wine and poured it out and there was a whole elaborate show of Mycroft taste-testing the wine and proclaiming it excellent. Arthur left his wine on the table and said, as soon as the waiter had moved away, “You’ve gone to quite a lot of a trouble to get me here, so why don’t you tell me why that is.” 

“I’m sure Mr. Eames has filled you in,” said Mycroft, taking a smooth sip of his wine. 

“It’s just Eames,” Arthur corrected him, because Eames had seven million ridiculous pet names for Arthur but Arthur had only one pet name for Eames, and maybe it was pathetic that it was just _Mr. Eames_ because Arthur wasn’t creative enough to come up with something better, but still, he didn’t like listening to Mycroft use it. “And Eames hasn’t filled me in because you haven’t told him enough.” 

“I thought Eames was in the habit of just making things up.” 

Eames said, “I told him the sordid tale about how well-endowed I am and how that intrigued you, but sadly he didn’t buy it.” 

Mycroft ignored Eames. “I wish to engage your services.”

“My services,” echoed Arthur, annoyed. He hated people who couldn’t just come out and _say_ things. “Which services would that be?”

“Funny, that’s exactly what Eames said,” remarked Mycroft. 

“We’re both multitalented,” inserted Eames. 

“Well, let’s just say I haven’t called you here because I need a chef,” said Mycroft. 

“A chef?” said Eames. 

“Wasn’t that the profession listed on your last tax return?” Mycroft asked Arthur innocently, lifting his eyebrows. 

And Eames choked on his wine. Violently. Arthur looked at him in alarm. So did most of the other patrons of the restaurant. A waiter came flapping over, but Eames waved him away, coughing and guzzling down water, and then he turned to Arthur and managed, “A _chef_?”

Arthur blinked, perplexed. “What?”

“Is that your cover story? _Seriously_? _Chef_?” And then Eames collapsed into gales of laughter. He was laughing so hard he couldn’t even hold himself upright. 

“Shh,” Arthur said, irritated. “You’re making a scene,” he hissed at him. “I happen to be a very good cook.”

“A _chef_ , Arthur,” wheezed Eames, around his hysteria. “Why would you ever have thought… What would ever make you think… A _chef_.” 

“Fuck you,” Arthur said, and longed to pour a glass of wine over his head. “There’s nothing wrong with being a chef. It’s a perfectly respectable profession.”

“Why wouldn’t you have gone with investment banking? You look that part so beautifully.” 

“No, I don’t.”

“Arthur—”

“Who’s to say I don’t look like a chef? I’m just a well-dressed chef.”

“A _chef_ ,” said Eames, and started giggling all over again. “ _Honestly_. Oh, this is the best thing to have happened to me in _months_. Thank you, Mycroft, for kidnapping me so that I could learn that my dear friend Arthur here is a chef in his free time. I had no idea.” 

“I’m never cooking anything for you ever,” Arthur promised him darkly. 

“You’ve never cooked anything for me yet, anyway,” Eames pointed out. 

“Maybe I was _going_ to. Someday. And now you’ll never know. Now you’ll just have to live the rest of your life never having tried my bouillabaisse. I make a fucking spectacular bouillabaisse, okay?”

“I don’t even know what that is, but I’m hoping it’s a euphemism,” said Eames. 

“And here I thought you were both world-class criminals,” interjected Mycroft sourly, looking very unamused by them. 

“World-class,” Eames agreed, still grinning broadly. “Best of the best. Cream of the crop.” 

“The criminal ranks are clearly running thin,” said Mycroft. 

“Probably you have no one to blame for that but yourself,” said Arthur, in a sulky mood because Eames was a terrible person, and he didn’t even care that Eames nudged his calf with his foot as if that was going to be some gesture of _apology_. For _laughing_ at him. Because Arthur did make fucking spectacular bouillabaisse and investment banking was _boring_. 

“What’s the job?” Arthur demanded, having had enough of everything. 

“Not to be discussed here in public,” said Mycroft, and, as if to emphasize the point, the waiter arrived with their steaks. 

Mycroft and Eames both began eating calmly. Arthur was starving, so he ate, but he hoped it looked like he was eating under protest, because he was displeased. 

“Then what was the point of taking us here?” he asked. 

“Because the steak is good and I thought you might be hungry,” Mycroft answered simply. “Also because I am not in the habit of immediately showing criminals top-secret government locations.” 

“Oh, are we supposed to gain your trust first? Is that it?” asked Arthur. 

“This is quite the trust-building strategy you’ve got going on here,” added Eames. “Blackmail, kidnapping, it all inspires me to want to impress you favorably.” 

“I’m not trying to earn your trust,” Mycroft said. “You’re trying to earn mine.” 

“ _Why_?” said Arthur. “We don’t want to work with you. We’ll walk away right now. No harm, no foul. What do you say? We’ll just all pretend none of this ever happened.”

Mycroft regarded him steadily. “Are you threatening me?” 

“He wouldn’t dream of it,” said Eames. “He doesn’t have a threatening bone in his body. Look at his cherubic face. Look at his _tie_.” 

Arthur refused to take the bait about his tie. He said, “Apparently what I’m doing is a terrible job of earning your trust. Which therefore makes me undesirable to work with, I’d imagine.”

“Which isn’t something you would wish to be, I assure you,” said Mycroft coldly. 

“Yes, I’ve been informed that I have a number of colorful crimes in my past,” said Arthur. 

“You have to understand,” said Eames, with a long-suffering air, as if he had all sorts of experience in being diplomatic, “this isn’t how it works for us. If you want to work with us, then you tell us what you want us to do, and we decide if we want to take the job.” 

“People don’t usually do a lot of _deciding_ when it comes to conversations with me,” said Mycroft. 

“Shocking,” said Eames, and looked at Arthur. “I find that _shocking_ , don’t you, darling?”

“Gambling in the establishment,” agreed Arthur, and Eames beamed at him like he’d said his lines correctly. 

Mycroft pushed his steak away, a sour look on his face, as if they were ruining his dinner. Arthur was okay with that. “I am not overly enthusiastic about this…scheme.” He pronounced the word disdainfully. 

“Interesting,” mused Eames, “since you seem to be the one actually _perpetrating_ the scheme.” 

“I have not normally found alliances with non-government operatives to be…fruitful,” Mycroft continued, still carefully selecting his word. “I am not generally in favor of your entire…operation.” 

“Eames raises an excellent point,” began Arthur. 

“And that’s not something you hear him say every day,” inserted Eames. 

“We’re not here _sightseeing_. You wanted us here, you got us here. So you start talking, or you let us go, but if you wanted to play games indefinitely, you’d’ve been better off with just Eames, he likes that stuff. Tell us what you want, or arrest me for your trumped-up crimes, but either way make up your mind, because waking hours are a terrible thing to waste this way.” 

Mycroft sat and regarded Arthur. Arthur regarded him back, keeping his gaze steady and even on him, refusing to back down. 

Eames, after a long moment of silence, said, “And now you see what makes him the best, hmm?”

Which made Arthur feel ridiculously warm with pleasure, that Eames would have said that. He resisted the urge to send Eames a fawning look and also the urge to squirm about in his chair with delight like a child. 

Mycroft wiped at his mouth with his napkin and placed it on the table. _Down to business_ , thought Arthur, and, relieved to be on footing he thought he could handle, began eating in earnest, his appetite suddenly returned with a vengeance. 

“We have a particular…person,” said Mycroft. 

“Wait,” said Eames. “Don’t give us too much to take in at once. You don’t want to overwhelm us with information. Arthur, did you get all that? You might want to write it down.”

Normally Arthur would have told Eames to shut up, or would have rolled his eyes at him, or would have ignored him. But Mycroft was clearly extremely annoyed by Eames, which made Arthur want to kiss him (which was not necessarily unusual, but this was for a _different reason_ ). So Arthur fished his notebook out and wrote very carefully in it. 

Mycroft, sighing heavily, said, “This person—”

“Wait,” Eames said again, holding up his hand. “Can’t you see he’s not finished?”

Arthur wrote _a person_ and then embellished it with some curly-cues for good measure. Then he said, “All right, please continue.” 

Mycroft bit out, “He’s proven difficult.”

“Difficult?” Arthur echoed, not sure what that meant exactly. “As in…militarized?” 

“Why can’t your lot do this job?” Eames asked, leaning back in his seat and crossing his arms. “Last time I looked, you actually _were_ the military.” 

Mycroft shook his head. “He isn’t militarized.” 

“What is it, then?” Arthur asked. 

“‘My lot,’ as you so eloquently put it, have never seen anything like it before. They can’t find their way in.” 

“Right. Sounds militarized,” said Arthur. “Why don’t they think it is?”

Mycroft settled his gaze on Arthur and replied evenly, “Because they’re all insane.”

Arthur blinked at him. 

Eames said, “They’re all what?”

“They’ve all gone insane. Every last one of them. He drives them mad.”

“That’s…” Arthur tried to wrap his mind around that. “That’s impossible. That doesn’t happen.” He looked at Eames, who was leaning forward in his chair, eyes narrowed. “Have you ever seen that happen? Or heard of it?”

“No,” Eames answered him, and said to Mycroft, “How’s he doing it? What do you mean by that?”

“They wake up raving.” Mycroft sounded almost bored now. “Their subconscious in complete disarray. We’ve sent teams in to try to sort them out, to no avail. Whatever happens in the dreams with this subject steals something vital to them. They end up wailing, in tears, sobbing, and we have no idea why. We end up sending them to limbo, just to be kind.” 

Arthur stared across the table. “And you want us to go in, to that?”

“Not necessarily. We need your ideas about it. Call it a consultation. We need the information in his head. It’s vital to national security,” said Mycroft. 

“He thinks we’re patriots,” Eames told him. 

“This isn’t even my fucking _country_ ,” Arthur pointed out. “And what does ‘not necessarily’ mean?”

“I vote that we take what’s behind door number two,” said Eames. 

“There is no door number two,” said Mycroft flatly. “We need to get into his head. I was told you two were my best chance. I’ll pay you ten times your usual fee and expunge your records when it’s over. Or I’ll lock you up and throw away the key. I don’t think I need to tell you that I don’t need to go through proper procedures for that.” Mycroft stood. “I’ll give you a few minutes to talk it over.”

_A few minutes_ , thought Arthur, watching him walk away, feeling furiously impotent. 

“This is why I told you to stay far away from London,” Eames said. 

“And then you would have been doing this alone. How would that be better?”

“Let’s not spend our few minutes of discussion having a disagreement about this. I’m doing this. I don’t have an option. I’m going to make my condition that you walk away.”

Arthur scowled at him. “It makes sense that you want to take this job, because you’re already insane, what have you got to lose?”

Eames moved forward suddenly and he looked more serious than Arthur had ever seen him, which was incredibly alarming. “Listen to me,” he bit out. “I didn’t want you involved in this in the first place. You’re young, and you’re clever, and you’re loyal to a fault, and you have a heart of gold you’d never admit to, and you have really nice dimples, and you look good in a suit, and you make fucking spectacular bouillabaisse, apparently. You’re not spending the rest of your life in prison for things that I did. You’re walking away.” 

“And you’re not any of those things?” Arthur retorted. 

“I don’t even know what bouillabaisse _is_.”

“Stop being literal. I’m not being literal. I’m not worth more than you. We’re not going to sit here and compare the value of our lives. I’m not walking away and letting you kill yourself here. You think I’d be able to live with myself?”

“You don’t normally lose sleep over other people dying, Arthur.” 

“That’s _different_ , Eames,” Arthur bit out at him in frustration. “There is no _comparison_. First of all, I don’t actually support people _dying_ unless they’ve tried to kill me first. Second of all, I don’t lose sleep over _other people_ dying. They’re not you. Do you really think, no matter what the circumstances, someone would tell me you’d died and I’d just _shrug_? And now you want me to be _responsible_ for it?” 

Eames stared at him for a long moment, and Arthur wondered abruptly if he had given away too much. Arthur was breathing fast in a vague sort of panic, and he never panicked over anything. Eames had worked with him enough to know that, so clearly it would be noteworthy that the thing that would make Arthur panic was the idea of losing Eames, losing the _idea_ of him in the world, losing the possibility of ever showing up and surprising him and saying everything he’d always meant to say.

Which he clearly wasn’t going to say _now_ , because Arthur could not think of a worse time to say: _You’re probably used to people saying this to you, and I know it’s fucking inconvenient, but I’ve been in love with you for a while now, let’s not make a big deal about it, let’s just do this terrible job and get out of here and go back to pretending that I don’t find you the most annoyingly delightful person in the universe._

Eames said, “Arthur,” slowly, like it was the beginning of something. 

Arthur shook his head and took a deep breath so that he could talk lightly and casually and not like his entire heart was hanging in the balance of this conversation. “If Mycroft came back and said that you could go, that he’d only wanted me all along, would you go?”

“Obviously I wouldn’t,” Eames snapped. 

“Right. You don’t understand why I’m here, and I don’t understand what you’re confused about, because I know your deepest, darkest secret.”

Eames actually looked vaguely uncomfortable. “What’s that?” he asked with an attempt at lightness. 

“I’m not the one with the secret heart of gold who’s too loyal for his own good. If you’d heard it was me in trouble and that you could help, you would have shown up immediately. You would have been smug and insufferable about it, and you probably would have made more of a mess than you would have helped, but you would have come. So let’s stop trying to out-noble each other and just…move on.”

Eames regarded him for a long moment, his expression inscrutable. Then he said, “This is all my fault. If he didn’t know about all of the crimes—”

“We’re going to talk about your love of petty crime and its destructiveness in a well-ordered life at a later point in time. In fact, there is going to be a whole fucking lecture on it during which you are never going to open your mouth to complain, and you’re going to take copious notes, and I’m going to make you read them out loud every night before you go to sleep.”

Eames paused, looking considering, then said, “I’ve never heard of anything like what Mycroft’s describing. Do you really think we can do this job?”

Arthur said, “I’m very smart, and you sometimes have a few above-average moments, so we might stand a chance.”

Eames, after a moment, smiled. “‘You are sometimes above average’ is the loveliest thing you’ve ever said to me, darling.”

“Don’t let it go to your head,” said Arthur. 

“Too late,” said Eames, beaming with that irritating teasing quality that Arthur had long ago resigned himself to wanting to kiss out of him. 

And then Eames turned abruptly serious, and Arthur felt a cold ball of dread. “I’m going to say something to you and I need you to not laugh.”

“I don’t laugh at you,” Arthur pointed out, “because you’re not funny.” 

“I got you into this. And I want to know the honest probability that you’ll be able to get us out of it without coming to despise me for this whole situation. Because I would rather you didn’t.” 

Arthur stared at him and for a moment was alarmed at how good an actor he apparently was, that Eames could have _no idea_ that there was zero possibility of Arthur despising him, not even with the high probability that he was going to get them both killed. It was ridiculous but true. 

Arthur said, “You called me and you told me to stay away and I came. So this is on me.” _Because you had no way of knowing I’m so in love with you I could fill my entire notebook with a list of the stupid self-destructive things I would do for you_ , Arthur added only silently. What he added out loud was, stubbornly, “I do _not_ hate you. And I won’t.” 

Eames looked at him for a second. Neither one of them had pulled away, and they were still leaning much too close together, and Arthur just _looked_ back at Eames and _wanted_. 

Eames said, “Arthur, seriously though, love, investment banking was sitting right there. Middle management, even. _Salesman_. You went with _chef_.” 

And Arthur should have been annoyed but he liked being back on their usual footing, and he found himself saying, “My bouillabaisse is transcendent, I’m telling you.” 

“Please tell me it’s orgasmic. Please say, ‘My bouillabaisse is orgasmic.’ It is literally the only thing I want in life.”

“Eames,” sighed Arthur, gathering effort to pretend he found him trying when he of course found him _adorable_. 

“We might die, very soon. We might never be able to have a conversation again. Don’t be cruel, darling, leave me with this one delicious euphemism to cling to for the rest of time.” 

Arthur stood. “You don’t even know what bouillabaisse is.”

“That’s what makes this conversation so _exquisite_ , pet.” 

Mycroft, seeing Arthur standing, walked back over to them. “Have we reached a conclusion?” he asked mildly. 

“We’ll do it,” Arthur said. “Twenty times the usual fee, records expunged, and in the event of our incapacitations the fee will still be paid to the people of our choice.”

Mycroft nodded once. “Done.”

“Also,” Eames added, “you’ve got to throw in a new suit for Arthur from Savile Row.” 

***

Mycroft had them blindfolded for transport to the secret government prison he was taking them to. Eames thought this was hilarious overkill. 

“I do like a bloke who’s upfront about his kinks on the first date,” he said, as the blindfold was settled around his eyes. 

Arthur said, “This wasn’t part of the negotiation.” 

Eames said, “Did you forget to establish a safeword, pet?”

Arthur said, “If you don’t shut up, I’m going to ask them to gag you, too.” 

Eames said, “I cannot believe the things I am learning about you tonight. Trollope, bouillabaisse, gags, whatever will you reveal next?”

Arthur said, “Gag him. Please.” 

But apparently no one was listening to Arthur’s orders, because nobody gagged Eames and instead the car they were in started moving. 

Mycroft said, “This isn’t negotiable. You don’t have top-secret clearance.”

“Actually,” remarked Eames, “I _do_ , just in a…different life.” 

“My life would be so much better if you were gagged,” said Arthur beside him. 

“And bound?” asked Eames. “One does live in hope, you know.” 

“I’m going to insist on you being gagged for every job we work together after this,” sighed Arthur. 

“What I love about you, darling, is your _optimism_ ,” said Eames. 

Eventually they reached their top-secret destination and were guided a bit indifferently through a variety of twists and turns before the blindfolds were removed. 

They were in a small room, looking through what was obviously a two-way mirror, into a cell in which a single man was sitting. He looked surprisingly regal, sitting there in the cell, like he was in complete control of the situation and considered the entire thing vaguely amusing. Eames, enjoying the novelty of being on this side of the mirror, walked straight up to it and studied the man frankly, and then shifted to look at the word written over and over and over and over on the walls and floor and the mirror itself. It sounded vaguely familiar to him, but he couldn’t place it, frowning at it in thought. 

“What’s Sherlock?” he asked. 

“Not important,” said Mycroft. 

“Obviously,” said Eames sarcastically, staring at the word’s recurrence. 

Arthur was standing with his hands in his pockets, his eyes narrowed, taking in everything. Eames was good at casing a joint as quickly as possible, but Arthur was actually better, which Eames would never have admitted. Arthur _wasn’t_ better at reading people though. Eames attributed it to his lack of imagination. Arthur was excellent at reducing people to the hard statistics of their lives, but it took Eames to connect the emotional dots. 

So Eames tried to look at the man in the cell and see everything Arthur wouldn’t, thinking that he and Arthur needed to complement each other as much as possible during this job, rely on the other’s strengths, admit their own weaknesses, and excel where they knew they could. So Eames looked at the arrogant tilt of the man’s head and the stubborn set of his jaw and the icy flatness of his eyes, seemingly staring knowingly into Eames’s. 

“What’s his name?” Eames heard Arthur say. 

“That’s classified,” Mycroft answered. 

Arthur sighed heavily. “We can’t get at his head without knowing anything about him. No wonder your men kept failing. Were you sending them in blind?”

“It’s a need-to-know basis,” said Mycroft coldly. 

“Well, we need to know everything,” replied Arthur. “You can tell me, or I can find out on my own.” 

“I’d like to see you try.”

“No,” Arthur rejoined evenly, “you really wouldn’t. This is what I _do_ , you know. If you wanted to keep everything about this man a secret, you probably shouldn’t have gotten a point man involved. You probably could have tricked Eames into jumping in unprepared, but my entire job description—the reason anyone would ever have mentioned me to you—is to make sure that we go in with no surprises, that everything goes exactly to plan, that we’re successful and no one gets hurt. So don’t pretend to be taken aback that I need to know things, because you knew enough about how dreamsharing works to be asking around about who should run point on a tricky job, and I’m sure whoever told you to get me warned you that I don’t take jobs where I’m not listened to. It’s a recipe for disaster, and I’ve been in this business too long to walk into disasters.” 

“You are not the only one who’s been in his particular business a long time,” Mycroft retorted. 

“We’re in very different businesses. If you don’t want my services, you can stop wasting my time. But these are my services. Let me do them, or pay me twenty times my usual fee to sit around that fancy hotel room watching Eames blindly fumble his way through an inept forgery.” 

Eames let the conversation play out behind him, aware that Arthur could handle this bit. Arthur’s reputation spoke for itself, and Arthur knew it, and that wasn’t arrogance, it was just part of Arthur’s air of confident self-possession that Eames found so devastatingly sexy under normal circumstances. 

Eames wasn’t paying attention to the devastating sexiness of Arthur putting Mycroft in his place about who ought to be in charge here. Eames was finding himself unable to look away from the man in the cell. He felt almost mesmerized, in an unpleasant fashion that he nevertheless couldn’t shake. 

The man smiled at Eames. More of a smirk. A knowing, chilling, terrifying smirk. Eames took a hasty step backward and made himself break the gaze. 

Arthur looked at him quizzically, and Eames managed a smile, while secretly being very worried. Because Eames had dealt with lots of unsavory people but never one that gave him such a feeling of hollowed-out emptiness to look at. The idea of going into that cold, sharp, vicious brain was already filling him with dread. Eames normally loved being in a dream, thrived on it, but this was entirely different, he knew already. 

Eames snuck another glance back at the man, trying to shake his feeling of foreboding. This was ridiculous. He was a _professional_. It was just going to be a dream, like a hundred other dreams. 

Arthur said, “Does he have a name? We can start with that.”

Mycroft said, “His name is Moriarty.”


	5. Chapter 5

Chapter 5

They were blindfolded for the trip back to the hotel. Mycroft didn’t accompany them, but Eames wasn’t in the mood to talk, and Arthur was quietly reflective. Their escort went with them up the lift and left them in the lobby, and Arthur immediately walked into the living area, pulling his jumper up over his head as he went. 

Eames said, truthfully, “I’m knackered.”

“You can have the bed if you want,” said Arthur, and grabbed the laptop that had appeared on the desk while they’d been gone. He picked up a stack of hotel stationery, too, and carried everything over to the coffee table, where he arranged it all very neatly and precisely. 

Eames watched him. “What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to work.” Arthur stuck a pen between his teeth and began tapping at the computer. 

Eames cursed internally and collapsed onto the sofa. 

Arthur looked at him and took the pen out of his mouth. “What are you doing?”

“I can’t go to sleep while you’re working.”

Arthur lifted his eyebrows. “It’s never seemed to bother you before.” 

“This is different,” Eames said. The _This is my fault_ was implied. 

Arthur turned back to his computer, tapping away at it again. “It’s really not.” 

“Yes, it is.” Eames frowned up at the ceiling. “I don’t like him.”

“Mycroft?” Arthur sounded distracted, already deep into research. 

“Moriarty.”

“It’s normally a good thing not to like a mark.” 

Not entirely what he’d meant, but Eames didn’t think he could say _I thought he was creepy_ without sounding like an idiot. So he shifted onto his side, watching Arthur work. “Let’s break out of here.”

“I don’t think we can,” Arthur responded absently. 

“You said you could fix the phone lines.”

“Eames, we wouldn’t get very far.”

“You don’t think we could disappear? Us?” Eames’s entire _life_ had been about disappearing, and Arthur was good at it when he had to be; Eames knew from the times he tried to locate Arthur and had to expend _effort_ to get it done. 

“We’d have to spend the rest of our lives on the run.” 

“Don’t we do that already?”

“Speak for yourself.” Arthur began making notes on a piece of paper. “My name is clear.” 

“Of course it is,” muttered Eames. Trust Arthur to be able to pull that off. 

Arthur’s pen scratched over the piece of paper. Then he said, “I have a family.” 

Eames looked over at him in shock. The thought that Arthur had a _family_ had never occurred to him. Some dreamsharers did—Cobb had, after all—but Eames could not believe that he had never heard a whisper about this. “You have children?”

Arthur rolled his eyes. “Don’t be an idiot. But I have parents. I have a sister. I have a niece and a nephew. My name is clear because I need it to be for them. So I can go home every so often. I’m not going to go on the run and abandon them. Not if I can help it.” Arthur turned back to his computer and his research and his notes, as if that had not been the most enormous amount of personal information he had ever divulged. 

Eames turned it all over in his head. Not Arthur as a father but as an adored and adoring uncle, arriving home on special occasions, weighed down with frivolous presents, swinging a little girl in the air, ruffling a little boy’s hair, the beloved prodigal son returning. He could see it. It made sense. “Do they think you’re a chef?” Eames asked. 

“I told you,” Arthur said, pen not pausing. “My bouillabaisse is—”

“Fucking spectacular, yes, I know. What the hell _is_ bouillabaisse?”

“It’s a seafood stew.” 

Eames fell silent, watching Arthur work. Arthur was silent, too, and Eames was relieved that Arthur didn’t ask if he had anyone who would miss him in the slightest if he disappeared off the face of the planet. Then again, Arthur probably didn’t ask because Arthur already knew. It made sense that Arthur would have researched thoroughly the background of everyone he’d ever worked with. Eames had never looked into Arthur’s past, because Eames didn’t care about people’s pasts, as a general rule. He considered pasts irrelevant, most of all his. And truthfully, he wanted to know everything about Arthur, but he wanted to hear it straight from Arthur. That would tell him so much more than any digging he could do, the words Arthur used, the expressions on Arthur’s face. Like just now, when he’d admitted he had a family, and it had been completely obvious that it was a family Arthur loved. Otherwise, they would have just been names on paper who Eames might have thought it possible he rang once a year on Christmas. 

Arthur suddenly put his pen down and looked at Eames, exasperated. “Are you going to do that all night?”

Eames blinked, surprised. “What?”

“Stare at me. It’s disconcerting.” 

“I don’t know. Are you going to work all night?”

“I generally do.”

“Do you really?”

“You usually miss that bit of a dreamshare, but yes, generally speaking, running point requires a couple of all-nighters at the beginning if you’re on a schedule.” 

Eames shook his head. “I think that’s just you.”

“No wonder every other point man out there is so fucking incompetent,” Arthur complained. 

“This is why I agree to work with you,” Eames told him gravely, “even though you are a seriously irritating person to work with. The _most_ irritating.” 

“The feeling is entirely mutual.”

“Slanderer,” said Eames. “I am an absolute _prince_ to work with.”

Arthur said meaningfully, “ _Rio_.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, you’re never going to let me live that down, are you?”

“We had to scale the building to escape because you couldn’t keep it in your pants.”

“In fairness, Arthur, they were _twins_ in _Rio_.”

“I don’t like heights,” said Arthur. 

“I’ve watched you swan-dive off the Empire State Building.”

“That’s in a dream, that’s entirely different. Go to bed now, I need to work.”

“Rio was the first time we ever worked together.”

“Exactly. It set the tone.” 

“If you hated me so much, why’d you agree to work with me again in Moscow?”

“Cobb called you in. I had nothing to do with it.”

Eames snorted. “As if you couldn’t get Cobb to leave me off jobs.”

“Why do people always think I could get Cobb to do whatever I wanted? He didn’t always listen to me.”

“You’re the best in the business. Why would you stick so devotedly to someone who didn’t always listen to you?”

“For a lot of different reasons,” said Arthur, as if that was an answer. And then he flipped the question around. “Why do you never stick devotedly to anyone?”

Eames considered him before saying slowly, “For a lot of different reasons.” 

“Exactly,” agreed Arthur, hands dancing over his keyboard. _Sharing time over_. “Now go to bed.”

“I could help you,” Eames suggested. 

Arthur shook his head, not looking at him. “This part’s best done alone.” Then Arthur paused and looked up and said, “I always do it alone,” as if to soften the blow. 

Eames said, “Do you really not like heights?”

“They’re not my favorite.” 

“I’m sorry about Rio, then.” 

After a moment, Arthur grinned. “I’m not. I let Cobb call you in again because I was hoping desperately I’d get to watch a furious, aproned grandmother hit you over the head with a rolling pin again.”

Eames grimaced. “She completely overreacted. There was no deflowering of any sort going on during that encounter.”

“Still. It made up for having to scale the building.” 

“I had a knot on my forehead for weeks from that.” 

“Serves you right. That entire job was a rookie mistake on your part. And you weren’t a rookie, you had more experience than me, so you can’t even use that as an excuse.”

What Eames didn’t say was that he’d been generally more reckless back then. Half of it was the stupidity of youth, he knew. And the other half was, oddly, that he hadn’t met Arthur yet. In Rio, he’d met Arthur, younger than him and greener than him, but so fucking good at everything he did and looking at Eames as if he was an idiot, and Eames had somehow decided to take dreamsharing a little more seriously, to rise up to Arthur’s level, because he’d bloody desperately wanted to work with Arthur again. And Arthur could do as much digging into Eames’s past as he wanted, but Eames had covered up the Arthurian weakness in him very well, if he did say so himself. 

What Eames said out loud was: “I didn’t expect a little old lady to start attacking me.”

“You didn’t think the twins turning up in your room was suspicious?”

“Of course not. Arthur, darling. Please do note my roguish good looks.”

Arthur’s dimples flashed in what for anyone else would have been a full-blown belly laugh, which made Eames bright with delight. He seldom got that out of Arthur. Arthur made you work harder for a show of amusement than anyone Eames had ever met. 

“Cobb had talked you up as being the best forger ever, you know,” Arthur said, his eyes practically twinkling at him. “I was so furious over the whole debacle, ranting and raving, and Cobb just said, ‘I know, I hear you, so just imagine what the _bad_ forgers are like.’”

“Did he say that?” said Eames, somewhat annoyed. 

Arthur nodded, then added, “Then I met bad forgers and saw that Cobb was right and so no, I didn’t fight him as much as I could have on you.” Arthur shrugged. “You’re good at what you do.”

Which was practically awarding a Nobel Prize in forgery to him in Arthur-speak. Eames said, “I do so love it whenever you flash that condescension at me.” 

Another glimpse of dimples, and Eames felt warm and content despite the skin-prickling encounter with Moriarty. 

Arthur said, “Go to bed. We’ll have a strategy meeting in the morning.”

Eames had zero desire to go to bed alone, not when Arthur was looking so _Arthur_ , calm and competent and note-taking, in his getting-things-done mode, with his sleeves rolled up and his tie loosened. An unusual part of Eames wasn’t even thinking about sex. He was thinking he would stay up all night just talking to Arthur, if Arthur wanted the company. 

But Arthur didn’t want the company. 

So Eames told him good night and went to bed and didn’t fall asleep for a very long time. He listened to Arthur, typing and writing in the other room, and he hoped for a dream that night, a dream of Arthur. 

He got a dream—of Moriarty, of that knowing smirk, of those dead eyes. 

This was why dreaming was overrated. 

***

Arthur worked through the night, barely noticing it. When what he was doing was interesting—and dreamshares were almost always interesting at the beginning, when they were a puzzle to put into order—he didn’t notice the time that it took. At some point the elevator door opened and an entire trolley of files was pushed off of it. They turned out to be a huge number of classified files, and Arthur dove into them with delight. Some of the incidents in the files had been clearly linked to Moriarty, some were just suspected, but by the time it was morning, Arthur had arranged around him in devastatingly efficient stacks the evidence of a complicated criminal network of which Moriarty was the head. 

Arthur glanced over his notes, thinking. He didn’t generally believe in good and evil. Most people were just people, and Arthur didn’t think it was his place to take sides in the complicated transactions human beings had with each other. He had never understood how anyone who had spent any time at all in it could ever think the world black and white enough to believe themselves to always be on the side of good and truth. So Arthur didn’t do dreamsharing out of the goodness of his heart, but he also didn’t do it out of a desire to create chaos. Who was he to say that the secrets he helped extract were better off secrets, shouldn’t have been shared in the first place? Arthur did dreamsharing because he was good at it and he loved it and it paid well, and so few people hit the trifecta of that for what they did for a living. Of course, it also happened to be illegal, which Arthur viewed sometimes as a minor drawback and other times as its main recommendation. He wasn’t weighed down with bureaucracy; he did as he pleased when he pleased, and his life was eminently his own. 

Arthur had standards, of course. He didn’t hurt innocent people. He tried not to hurt anyone at all. He didn’t want to cause the downfall of governments, or rain attacks of terror down on unsuspecting populaces, or even gather up blackmail to make himself lots of money. He didn’t want to start World War III, as Eames had pointed out. But Arthur acknowledged that, while he didn’t think his job caused much harm, he didn’t also think it caused a great deal of good. His job just _was_. 

But here, with this, they might actually be doing good. A lot of good. If the information Arthur had read through all night was correct, Moriarty was a terrible, cold, heartless person who had been wreaking havoc on people for no reason other than _fun_ , who had left behind him a wake of nonsensical killings. Moriarty, frankly, was a homicidal and capricious bully who had managed to gather for himself far too much power. He saw now why Mycroft was desperate enough to know Moriarty’s secrets that he would have kidnapped a couple of dreamsharers to get them. 

Arthur still wasn’t entirely sure why it had been Eames who had been Mycroft’s first target. He supposed Eames had been local and thus easier, and Eames did have an excellent, well-deserved reputation. But Arthur didn’t think Mycroft was going to be happy about who Eames was clearly going to have to forge, so why get a forger involved at all? 

_He did it to get to you_ , said the voice in Arthur’s head, which made even less sense. Arthur was good at what he did, but Mycroft shouldn’t have wanted a good point man; Arthur could already tell they were just going to end up bashing heads. 

Maybe it was just that Mycroft didn’t know much about how to put together a dreamsharing team. Maybe official dreamsharing teams were this poorly equipped for their jobs. Maybe that was why they had been going insane trying to go into Moriarty’s brain unprepared. 

Maybe someday Arthur would get tired of life in the field and retire and teach responsible dreamsharing to government operatives. 

The shower went on in the bathroom adjoining the bedroom. Eames, up and awake. Arthur scrubbed the night of wakefulness off his face with his hands and pulled himself up and into the bedroom, intending to choose an outfit to face the day with. Instead he drew himself up short, halfway over to the closet, and looked curiously at the bed. Which was made. Imperfectly, it was true, but still. Eames had slept in the bed, woken up, and made it. 

Arthur smiled at Eames’s made bed because he didn’t really let himself smile at Eames, and then he let himself sprawl across it, because it was good to lay on something that wasn’t as cramped as the couch or as unforgiving as the floor. Two minutes, he thought, turning his head into the pillow. It smelled like Eames, and Arthur smiled again and stretched luxuriously. Just until Eames got out of the shower, and then he’d stop creepily sniffing Eames’s pillow and get up and fill Eames in on what he’d learned. 

***

Eames showered and shaved and dressed and walked out of the bathroom in a puff of steam that, after it had dissipated, revealed Arthur, face-down in the center of the bed, snoring. 

Damn it, thought Eames. Because, honestly, Eames was well aware that they had jobs that required them to sleep in each other’s presence all the time, but Arthur just _was not like this_ when he slept for work, and Eames was having the world’s most difficult time resisting Arthur when he _was like this_. Eames wanted to crawl onto the bed with Arthur and settle next to him, and Arthur would stir and mumble something and use Eames as a pillow and fall immediately back to sleep, and Eames would let him sleep for a little while before kissing him awake, and Arthur would kiss back, tug at Eames’s clothing, not say a word except for Eames’s name. 

Or Arthur would punch him. This seemed more likely to Eames. Arthur hated to be flirted with. He only glowered at Eames when Eames did it, but Eames had seen him do much more unpleasant things to sources of unwanted attention. Eames had never quite known if this was because Arthur was in love with Cobb or because Arthur just didn’t do sexual entanglements. Eames could see Arthur being the professional type who would try to avoid such things. Whereas Eames thought such things were the spice of life and should be indulged in liberally. It was part of why Arthur fascinated him so much. 

So Eames didn’t crawl onto the bed and settled instead for tugging the edge of the duvet up and over Arthur and wondered if he was going to spend the entirety of this job tucking Arthur into bed and whether he would relish it or dread it or equal parts of both. 

“Your sleep schedule is a serious fucking mess, love,” Eames informed Arthur solemnly, looking down at him, because if he talked to him it was less stalker-ish to be watching him sleep, surely. Although Eames wasn’t sure talking to a sleeping man wasn’t stalker-ish in and of itself. 

Whatever. He decided against pushing Arthur’s sleep-tumbled hair off his forehead and walked out into the living area instead. The living area was a forest of precise piles of paper. Eames shook his head with more fondness than he liked to admit to and picked his way through the piles over to the lift lobby, where there was a trolley of croissants. 

“Couldn’t have sprung for a full English?” muttered Eames, irritated, but grabbed a croissant and a cup of coffee in a preposterously tiny cup that would contain three swallows, and moved back over to Arthur’s Forest of Research Trees. 

Arthur’s notes were carefully laid out, and Eames would have hesitated to read them if he hadn’t known from his experience yesterday that Arthur’s notes were highly professional and incredibly useful. There was no chance he was going to come across a frivolous page delineating all of Eames’s best qualities, more’s the pity. 

So, deciding it would save them a great deal of time if Eames used Arthur’s sleep to catch up on what Arthur had learned during Eames’s sleep, he cleared himself enough space to settle on the sofa and read. 

Arthur had managed to synthesize together an astonishing amount of information. It was dotted through with cross-references, and Eames eventually found himself on the floor reading through fascinating classified government files while munching on his fourth croissant of the day. 

Which was how Arthur found him when he walked out into the living area. He was impeccably dressed and put together, back to a three-piece suit, and Eames realized he’d been so engrossed he hadn’t even heard Arthur showering. 

“Good morning,” he said, and turned back to the file, which was detailing a pretty piece of art fraud that Eames had heard discussed admiringly many times in his circles. 

“You should have woken me,” said Arthur. 

“You needed to sleep, and your notes are as good as you. This stuff is _amazing_ ,” said Eames. 

“I thought you’d like it,” remarked Arthur from where he was helping himself to the remaining croissants and pouring his own cup of coffee. 

“The trouble is that half of these things are such genius I’m furious I didn’t come up with them, and the other half of them are fucking _terrifying_.”

“Yes,” agreed Arthur, sitting on the sofa. “That is the trouble.” 

“No wonder Mycroft wants in his head that badly. Can you imagine what he’s got in there? We could save so many lives, Arthur. I’m seriously thinking we might be knighted.”

“I’m American,” Arthur pointed out. “Can I be knighted?”

“Who the fuck cares?” said Eames. “This is going to be _astonishing_.”

Arthur looked vaguely puzzled by him. “I didn’t think you were this motivated by…doing good.” 

“Under ordinary circumstances, Arthur, human beings can’t do good or bad on this scale, mostly they just _exist_ and do the best they can. But this is a special situation. Also, I hate this bastard and I’m ready to get into his head.” 

“He got under your skin yesterday.” 

Which Eames didn’t like to admit, but yes. “Occupational hazard of being a forger. You spend a lot of time trying to get to know who a person is as immediately as possible. He wasn’t a pleasant one.” 

“It’s what I do, too. It’s not just a forger’s problem.”

Eames shook his head. “You spend a lot of time trying to piece together who the person is.” Eames gestured at all the files. “This has all been fascinating, but it isn’t what I need to know to do what I do. I don’t care about any of this stuff, in the long run. I need to find _who he is_ , not what he’s done. And who he is is even more unpleasant than what he’s done. But.” Eames leaned over and picked up the piece of paper Arthur had left on the top of the main stack, where Arthur’s precise handwriting had written _SHERLOCK_. Eames had underlined and circled and starred it. 

“What the hell did you do to my notes?” asked Arthur. 

“Added some proper emphasis.” 

“The amount of redundancy you have managed to create in a _single word_ is impressive,” said Arthur. 

Eames ignored him. “This is who I have to forge.” 

“That’s my thought, too,” Arthur agreed. 

“Moriarty is _obsessed_ with him. He’ll spill every secret he has in an effort to impress him. This is foolproof and brilliant and so bloody obvious from the very first moment you see Moriarty’s cell that I thought the other dreamsharers must have tried it and got nowhere. But they never did it the right way, did they?”

“No,” said Arthur. 

“Because Sherlock is Mycroft’s beloved little brother.”

“Yes, you caught where we’d heard the word before.” 

“Mycroft’s phone conversation about Baskerville. I didn’t remember at first, but it’s all come back to me now. And I’d go all in that Mycroft never let any of the forgers he’s worked with before have proper access to Sherlock to get a good enough forge together.” 

“I wouldn’t normally encourage you to gamble, but I think you’d win in that instance.” 

“So they did a bad job forging and somehow Moriarty managed to absolutely tear their subconscious _apart_. How do you think he’s doing that?” Eames furrowed his brow in thought and looked around at Arthur’s paper piles, none of which got him any closer to the answer to that question. 

“I still have no idea about that. I put a couple of feelers out there to see if anyone else has ever heard of this happening, but I’ve heard nothing yet. In the meantime, I think we should probably pay a visit to one of the affected people, see if we can glean anything from them in limbo.” 

“I think that sounds right,” Eames said, and leaned back on his hands. “I’m not doing this until Mycroft gets us access to Sherlock. And we’re sure those are their real names?”

“No, actually, they’re middle names, for both of them, but they are on their birth certificates, yes. And I wouldn’t _let_ you do this without access to Sherlock. He’s clearly the key to the whole thing.”

“You can build, right?” Eames asked. 

“Yes,” Arthur answered, and hesitated. “I’m not the most…” 

“Creative?” Eames guessed, raising an eyebrow. 

“Shut up,” Arthur said sulkily. “I have other talents.”

“Not denying it,” Eames said magnanimously, amused. 

“But I can build. I was thinking a prison. Everything in his mind is a secret. The bigger secrets he’ll store on the inside, maximum security. We’ll work our way into them.” 

“It’s a good idea. But I cannot imagine we’re getting this done in just one level.” 

“No,” Arthur sighed. “Which means we need to bring someone else in, because it would be suicide to go into the second level alone.” 

“Who would you bring in?” Eames asked, bracing himself for the mention of Cobb. Eames didn’t relish having to have an argument about how Eames had vowed never to work with Cobb again considering the last time Cobb had basically almost killed all of them and never even _apologized_. 

But Arthur surprised him by saying, “I don’t know. I don’t know that there’s anyone else I trust enough to…” Arthur cut himself off and sipped at his coffee. 

Eames had a wild moment of wondering if Arthur had just admitted that he trusted Eames more than any other dreamsharer he knew, a thought Eames thought he could get dangerously drunk on if he let himself internalize it. Probably what Arthur meant was that he didn’t trust _any_ dreamsharers, but he was clearly stuck with Eames so there was nothing to be done about it. 

Eames said, trying to be practical, “Okay. Well, let’s keep thinking about it, and in the meantime let’s get Mycroft to give us access to Sherlock.”


	6. Chapter 6

Chapter 6

“Absolutely not,” was what Mycroft Holmes said. 

Arthur, who now knew the man’s entire name and more about his family history than he thought Mycroft would want, said, “Then the job is off.”

“Perhaps you’ve forgotten,” began Mycroft furiously. 

“I haven’t forgotten anything,” Arthur replied evenly. “But _you_ have forgotten that my job is to get you this information. _That_ is my forger.” He pointed at Eames, who was sitting at the suite’s dining room table calmly eating a hamburger that had arrived with Mycroft. “And I’m not letting him go into a job that’s going to destroy him. Because he is the best and if you get this wrong with him, you’re not going to get a second chance. So we need access to Sherlock.”

Mycroft stared at him stonily. 

Eames said, “This hamburger is ever so slightly overdone.” 

Mycroft said, “Do you think the other forgers haven’t tried to forge Sherlock? It _doesn’t work_.”

“Did you give them access to him?”

“They don’t need access. Sherlock’s all over the news; he’s a minor celebrity here. Surely you’ve heard of him.” Mycroft looked pointedly at Eames. 

“I only pay attention to the news if it’s about me,” Eames replied. “I’m serious about this hamburger. I don’t know what they’re charging you, but I might complain if I were you.” 

“Watching the news isn’t how a forger works. Eames, tell him how forgery works.”

Eames licked a bit of ketchup off his thumb—which definitely did not get filed away automatically by Arthur for his Eames Being Hot In Ridiculous Situations mental file—and said, “Forgery needs first-hand exposure to be truly successful. I could do a passing mimicry based off of news reports if I had to, and it would be decent and would fool a lot of people, but clearly this Moriarty bloke isn’t easily fooled. So I need to meet your brother. Go for pints with him or something.”

Mycroft stared at him. “Go for _pints_ with him?” he echoed faintly. 

“Arthur, you really ought to eat something, you’re wasting away, darling,” said Eames. 

Mycroft said, “You need to find somebody else to forge.”

“Somebody else to forge?” Arthur repeated flatly. “What the hell is wrong with you? Moriarty is _obsessed_ with your brother. Obviously he’s the one Moriarty will tell all his secrets to. No one else will do.”

“What if you forge me?” offered Mycroft. 

Arthur lifted his eyebrows. “Because Moriarty has been so forthcoming with you so far?” 

“My brother is…” began Mycroft, on a sigh, and trailed off and stared out the window. 

Arthur, alarmed, exchanged a look with Eames and said, “Okay, this is _exactly_ why we need to meet him.” 

***

Sherlock was incredibly bored. Sherlock measured his levels of boredom on a highly scientific scale. The highest previously recorded level of boredom was 38,920. Sherlock had now highly scientifically assessed himself as being at a boredom level of 1,801,203. 

“You just solved a case,” John said. 

John had such funny ideas about the definition of the word _just_. In fact, Sherlock didn’t think John even knew the definition of the word _just_ , given how inaccurately he always used it. “That was ages ago,” Sherlock sulked at the sofa cushion. Sherlock was at the level of boredom where he was counting the fibers of the sofa cushions. 

“It was yesterday, Sherlock.”

Sherlock made an exclamation and turned violently over on the sofa to stare at John. 

John, sitting in his chair with a cup of tea raised to his mouth, said, sounding alarmed, “What?”

“ _Yesterday_? It’s been an entire _day_? This is even worse than I thought. I didn’t know so much _time_ had passed.”

John sipped his tea and went back to his novel, clearly not appreciating the pressing nature of their problem. “Why don’t you play the violin?”

“Will no one murder someone in an _interesting way_?” Sherlock complained to the ceiling. “Is that simply too much to ask for? What’s happened to all the good serial killers?”

“The world is truly going to the dogs,” said John, without looking up, still failing to grasp the seriousness of what was happening. 

“That hound case wasn’t even that interesting,” grumbled Sherlock. 

“You loved it at the time,” John said. 

Sherlock said, “The murder was old. This is the state we’ve come to, there are no good new murders, I must solve _old_ ones.” 

And then, even though Sherlock could barely conceive of it, the day got worse, because Mycroft arrived.

“Oh my _God_ ,” said Sherlock, with all the fervor he could muster, as he heard the door open downstairs, and rolled himself back over to face the cushions. 

“What now?” asked John, but then Mycroft’s steps sounded on the stairs and even John could hear that and then Mycroft was saying, “Hello, John, lovely weather, isn’t it?” and John was saying, “Tell me you’ve brought a case.” 

Sherlock turned over and said, “I won’t take a case from _him_.” 

“You’ll take a case from him,” said John, “or else.” John gave Sherlock the Captain-Watson look that Sherlock seldom disobeyed because he knew that that particular look was John driven to his limits. John generally had very roomy limits so Sherlock did try to respect them when he eventually hit them. Mostly because he lived in abject terror of John moving out. 

But Sherlock wasn’t going to _acknowledge_ that he was going to take a terrible Mycroft case, so he rolled onto his back and looked petulantly up at the ceiling and said nothing. 

Mycroft led with a question Sherlock would never have anticipated. “What do you know about dreamsharing?”

Sherlock turned his head slowly and gave Mycroft an appraising look. 

“Dreamsharing?” echoed John. “That’s just a myth perpetrated by conmen to get jumpy businessmen to pay them to ‘militarize’ against nonexistent threats.” 

“So clearly you were never tapped for it in the army,” remarked Mycroft, and arranged himself in Sherlock’s chair. 

John blinked at him. “What?”

“You’re having some difficulty with dreamsharing,” Sherlock deduced. “Why come to me?”

“Wait a second.” John looked between the two of them. “Dreamsharing is…real? A real thing? That works?”

“I don’t know how well it works,” said Sherlock, “given that the government runs it.”

“The government doesn’t run all dreamsharing,” said Mycroft. “There are…rogue PASIV machines that may have leaked out. Not from _our_ government, you understand.”

“Of course not.” Sherlock was cataloguing everything he could about Mycroft but getting nowhere. What job involving dreamsharing could Mycroft have? Did he want Sherlock to track down one of the rogue machines? 

“Dreamsharing is a sanctioned method of extracting information from persons of interest,” continued Mycroft, as if he had to explain this. 

“For real?” said John, still sounding disbelieving. 

“Yes, for real,” Sherlock assured him impatiently. “Dreamsharing exists, it’s an _actual thing_. But what does it have to do with me?” Mycroft was being annoying, so Sherlock decided he just had to be blunt. 

Mycroft took a deep breath and said, “We have Moriarty in custody.” 

“Since when?” asked John, surprised.

Sherlock was also surprised but he sat up silently. 

Mycroft ignored John’s question, looking at Sherlock. “There is information within Moriarty’s head that we need. And it turns out that it is the opinion of _experts_ that you are the only one he’ll divulge that information to.”

Sherlock drew in a delighted breath. “So you want me to dreamshare into Moriarty’s brain?”

“Absolutely not,” snapped Mycroft. “I have hired professionals to do that. It’s just that one of these professionals is a forger.” 

“I’m guessing you don’t mean fake passports and counterfeit bills?” said John. 

“He’s going to go into Moriarty’s head pretending to be you. It’s what he does. But he insists he needs to meet you in person to do it well enough to fool Moriarty.”

Sherlock arched a dubious eyebrow. “You have someone who you think is going to be capable of impersonating _me_?”

“I’ve been assured by multiple sources that he’s the best forger there is.”

“I don’t care, he isn’t going to be able to trick Moriarty into thinking he’s me.” 

“It is what he _does_ ,” Mycroft insisted. 

Sherlock considered. He knew that this forger’s plan to imitate Sherlock wasn’t going to work. But Mycroft would want the information in Moriarty’s head. Badly. And Moriarty was only going to tell that information to Sherlock. 

Which meant that it was only a matter of time before Sherlock could convince everyone involved that _he_ needed to go into Moriarty’s head. 

No longer the least bit bored, Sherlock said, “When can we meet the forger?” 

***

“I’m making tea,” John said, “because it’s only polite, but I’m making tea for _criminals_ , so I’m trying to keep it in perspective.”

Sherlock was practically bouncing off the walls with enthusiasm. Sherlock had thought of nothing but dreamsharing since Mycroft’s visit the day before. Sherlock had stayed up reading everything he could about dreamsharing and going through the dossiers Mycroft sent over. _Criminal dreamsharers_. Not boring military ones, but _interesting_ ones who had _done_ things. Sherlock could not remember the last time he had been so excited about having guests over. He even helped clean, which caused John to make a terrible joke about whether or not Sherlock had already been replaced by the dreamsharer’s imitation. John making terrible jokes was #289 on Sherlock’s List of Reasons to Kiss John Watson, so that had been a bit distracting, but not that distracting in light of _criminal dreamsharers coming to their flat_. To discuss _invading Moriarty’s mind_. 

John regarded Sherlock’s wild anticipation and looked equal parts amused and curious and resigned. “Doesn’t it creep you out?”

“What?” asked Sherlock. “Having criminals in the flat? Of course not.”

“No. Going into other people’s heads.”

“Why should it? It’s practically what I do already.”

“Right,” said John, looking troubled. “Yes. I suppose. It’s just that…some things you like to think exist only for you. You don’t want other people coming in rifling through them.”

Sherlock thought of all of the rooms of his mind palace devoted to everything John Watson and saw John’s point. “But think of how much you could _learn_ ,” Sherlock countered. 

“It’s one of those things that’s much better happening to other people than you,” remarked John. 

“You could always have your brain militarized, if you’re worried about it. In fact, I’d wager your brain is already heavily militarized. It’s probably your default position. John, you should let them—”

“No.” John held up a hand. “No one is going into my brain. Got it?”

Sherlock frowned. 

“ _Sherlock_ ,” said John. 

Sherlock thought again of the John Watson wing in his mind palace and agreed. “Yes. Fine. Okay.” 

The doorbell rang, and Sherlock looked at his watch. “Right on time,” he pronounced gleefully. 

“Just what I like: punctual criminals,” said John with wry amusement. 

They walked in looking a great deal like the pictures in the dossiers, meaning that Mycroft’s surveillance had been decent for a change. The one named Arthur was in an expensive three-piece suit that would have looked at home on Mycroft, with just a slightly more interesting tie hinting at something better underneath the polish and the carefully slicked-back hair. The one named Eames wore a truly terrible shirt that rivaled John’s Christmas jumpers for poor taste. 

They said hello to John pleasantly and introductions went around as if this was some kind of dull business meeting. Sherlock drank them in silently, filing away every detail about them that he could. 

John said, “Tea?”

The one named Eames said, “Arthur doesn’t drink tea. It’s part of his sad national heritage.”

“I can make coffee,” John offered. 

“No trouble necessary,” said Arthur, with a polite but quick smile. Arthur was clearly ready to get on with things. He was already walking toward Sherlock, pulling a notebook out of his inside coat pocket. 

Eames, behind him, said, “It would be fantastic if you could make him coffee; he might be less grouchy with coffee.” 

Arthur ignored this, saying, “You must be Sherlock,” and holding his hand out to him. 

Sherlock took it, studying Arthur’s eyes closely. “Yes,” he said absently. 

“It’s good to meet you,” said Arthur. “Your brother filled you in on what we need?”

“He said that one of you is going to ‘study’ me in order to imitate me in a dream,” Sherlock said, eyes cutting over to Eames, who was jovially adding milk to his tea as if this were a social occasion. 

“Yes.” Arthur seemed to realize that Eames was now considering one of Mrs. Hudson’s biscuits, whilst John explained which kinds they were. “Eames,” Arthur said, his voice sharp with exasperation. “Can you come over here and do your job?”

“In a minute, Arthur. They’re offering _biscuits_. It would be rude not to have a biscuit. Arthur is never rude,” Eames told John. “Except for when he’s always rude. But that’s generally to me.” 

Arthur rolled his eyes and sighed heavily and scratched something in his notebook. Sherlock looked between the two of them, considering. 

Eames walked over to Arthur and handed him a biscuit. “Look, darling, I got you a biscuit.” 

Arthur gave it a baleful look. “It’s a cookie.” 

“You’re so very welcome, love, it was no trouble at all,” said Eames, and then turned to Sherlock. “Hello there.” 

“You’re the forger,” said Sherlock. 

“I am, indeed, the forger. Normally the person I’m going to forge doesn’t know that I’m meeting them so I can forge them, so this might be slightly awkward but generally you should—”

“You’re not going to ‘forge’ me,” said Sherlock. 

This gave Eames pause. Eames’s face was basically an open book. Arthur played his cards much closer to the vest, but he did give Sherlock an appraising look. 

So Sherlock started with Arthur, because why not? “You actually don’t care for coffee. You don’t like suits, and you don’t like wearing your hair that way. And you hate your dimples. You had a croissant for breakfast, so did Eames. Not your choice, which you know my brother realizes, it’s part of a power play. You’re naturally inclined to be right-handed, but you’ve carefully cultivated ambidextrous abilities, I suppose primarily so that you can shoot easily with either hand. You’re an older brother, with a younger sister, and you actually like her and she likes you, it’s all very sickening. You have a weakness for terrible spy novels—you should talk to John about this proclivity—but generally you read serious fiction. _The English Patient_ , most recently, I think. Also, it’s obvious that you’re in lo—”

“That’s enough,” Arthur cut him off, eyes narrow. 

“I was wondering how long you were going to let me go,” remarked Sherlock, and then turned his gaze to Eames. “As for you. You’re a terrible gambler, you should give it up altogether, but you never will because you are the exact opposite of Arthur and carefully cultivate all of the vices he has carefully given up. You never put down roots anywhere, also the opposite of Arthur, I might add, who can’t help putting down roots everywhere he goes. Clearly an illegitimate son, abandonment issues, et cetera, et cetera.” Sherlock waved his hand. “I don’t know what happened to your mother, but I can’t imagine it was anything good—”

“That’s enough,” said Arthur again, his voice colder this time than it had been the first time. 

“Right,” said Sherlock, with a quick smile in his direction. “Exactly.”

“Exactly what?” demanded Eames. “What the bloody hell was that?”

“All the proof you need,” said Sherlock, pleased with himself. 

“What proof?”

“That you’re never going to be able to imitate _me_ well enough to fool Moriarty. So clearly the answer is that I need to go into the dream as myself.” 

Arthur and Eames stared at him. 

John said, “What?”

Sherlock said, “John, do please make that coffee. I suspect we are going to have a long day.” And then he beamed.


	7. Chapter 7

Chapter 7

Arthur should have expected the onslaught—it was all over Sherlock’s website, this bragging about his ability to know everything about someone at a glance—but truthfully he had thought most of it to be exaggeration or lies. He and Eames made a living out of hiding who they were, and Arthur hadn’t been worried at all. Then Sherlock had pegged correctly basically _every single thing_ about him, right down to the deduction Arthur had cut off, which he was sure had been about the fact that he was in love with Eames. His most carefully protected secret, one which he thought he did such a good job of hiding, and Sherlock had seen it so immediately, so obviously, that Arthur was alarmed and wondering what the fuck had given him away. 

And the closeness of the call made him furious, made him want to lean over and strangle this ridiculous, dramatic man who would have so casually brought Arthur’s carefully constructed _look-what-good-friends-we-are!_ act down around his ears. And who had then followed it up by dredging up Eames’s unhappy childhood as if that had anything to do with anything. 

Arthur said, suddenly, “I’ll make the coffee,” because if he spent another minute in that room he was going to end up killing their kidnapper’s little brother, which probably wouldn’t bode well for him or Eames. 

“Hang on a minute,” said John Watson. “Sherlock, what are you talking about?” 

“Arthur, you can’t go make _coffee_ ,” said Eames, sounding quizzical. 

“I am perfectly capable of making coffee, Mr. Eames, I assure you,” Arthur snapped at him. 

“You can’t go into this dream,” John told Sherlock, clearly not interested in the drama over the coffee. 

Eames said, “I’m sure you are. I have no doubt it is one of the plethora of things at which you excel. But you can’t go make coffee in _someone else’s kitchen_.”

“Oh my God,” said Arthur, “you’ll lift an heirloom watch off a man’s wrist, but you won’t rummage in someone else’s kitchen? Your priorities are absurd.” 

Eames was looking confused by him, which Arthur didn’t blame him for, because he knew he was reacting out of all proportion for what had just happened. Sherlock had said relatively minor things to him as compared to Eames. Eames had no idea how close Arthur had come to the revelation of the most monumental secret of his life, and also no idea that that secret was why Arthur reacted so personally to attacks against Eames. 

John and Sherlock were engaged in a full-fledged disagreement over the dream thing, as if Arthur was ever going to let them make the decision anyway, and Arthur, feeling like he needed to get out his nervous energy, walked firmly into the apartment’s kitchen and drew to a halt. He stared at the chemistry equipment all over the table. And despite all the other turmoil his brain was in, the point man part of Arthur clicked into gear, tumbled into place. 

This, he thought, was why he was the best at this. 

Arthur turned and walked back into the living room, where John was saying scathingly, “You don’t know anything about dreamsharing.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Sherlock retorted, “I researched it last night.” 

Arthur walked over to where Eames was still standing, watching them, looking uncertain as to what he ought to do. 

Eames glanced back at him. “Thought we’d just let them fight it out. Where’s your coffee?” 

Arthur didn’t so much ignore him as decide he wasn’t as important as what Arthur had just discovered. “You’re a chemist,” he said to Sherlock. 

Sherlock and John stopped in the middle of overlapping sentences. Sherlock gave him a disdainful look. “Yes. I thought you were supposed to be good at your job. Didn’t you look me up?”

“An actual chemist. Not just one in theory. You’ve got chemistry equipment.” 

“Arthur,” said Eames slowly, clearly connecting the dots. 

Arthur held up his hand to hold Eames off. “You’re what we need,” he said to Sherlock. 

Sherlock looked torn between being irritated and gratified. “Isn’t that what I’ve been saying?”

“Would you excuse us for a second?” Eames said abruptly and grabbed Arthur by the shoulder. 

“No,” said Arthur. “I—”

“Very pressing developments with…butterflies that we have to discuss,” said Eames, propelling Arthur out of the room. 

“ _Butterflies_?” said Arthur. “Aren’t you supposed to be a good liar?”

“It’s a code word,” Eames said, now marching him down the stairs. 

“A code word for what?”

“For ‘Arthur’s lost his bloody mind and needs Eames to help him find it,’” Eames bit out, now shoving Arthur out the door and onto the front stoop. 

“That code word isn’t ‘butterflies,’” Arthur snarled at him, pulling his arm out of Eames’s grasp, annoyed at being pushed around. 

“Trust you to have an actual code word for that,” grumbled Eames. 

“I don’t,” Arthur admitted. “But I have a code word for ‘Eames is an obnoxious prick.’”

“What does that code word happen to be?” drawled Eames lazily. 

“Fuck off,” Arthur informed him. 

“Cunning. No one will ever guess what you mean by that code word, pet. Just so you know, my code word for ‘Eames is going to end up smothering Arthur with a pillow before all this is over’ is ‘marmalade.’”

“You are the worst code-word creator in the history of time!” Arthur shouted at him. 

“It’s not my job!” Eames shouted back at him. 

Arthur blinked suddenly. “What the hell are we arguing about?”

Eames reverted back to their original argument with ease. “You’re going to bring a civilian into this dream? Into _this dream_?”

“Yes,” Arthur said stubbornly, standing his ground. “I think it’s our only play.”

Eames regarded him for a moment, then said, “Give me a second, would you? I have to check my totem to make sure this is a dream and some truly terrible forger is pretending to be you.” 

“He’s a chemist, Eames.”

“So what? There are a million bloody chemists in this city, studying at universities and whatnot. He’s not unique.”

“First of all, I don’t think there are a million chemists in this city; I think your estimate is high,” said Arthur. 

“ _Marmalade_ ,” Eames growled at him. 

“Second of all, he’s clearly unique, Eames. We walked in there and he knew everything about us.”

“He’s got dossiers on us.” 

“Do you think my dossier contains the vital intelligence that I don’t like my dimples?” _Or that I’m in love with you_ , Arthur added silently. 

Eames was silent for a moment, then said, “Do you really not like your dimples? Your dimples are lovely.” 

“Beside the point,” Arthur said. 

“I have no idea what your bloody point is,” Eames replied. “As far as I can tell, you think your point is that you’re going to let this madman in on our dreamshare when we could just about convince our mutual kidnapper to let us _forge_ him, never mind pull him in for real.”

“He’s going to solve our two level problem.”

“Because you’re going to trust him to stay behind in the first level and hold things together?” 

“No, I’ll take him with me.”

Eames snorted. “Alone? Like hell you will. It’d be a suicide mission.” 

“Well, I’m not letting him go alone with _you_.” 

“Then it turns out he solves exactly none of our problems, does he?”

Damn it. Arthur hadn’t thought it entirely through, which was unlike him, and he was furiously annoyed with Sherlock for throwing him off his game. And then realized. “But he’s a chemist. If we can get him to make us a mix that’ll get us a deep enough sedation to do this on one level—” 

“You want to use a sedative? On a one-level dream?”

“I’ve been thinking that we have to use a sedative. Moriarty’s making people insane, Eames, through his _dreams_. We’ve got to do something to try to shut down his subconscious.” 

“In that case, a sedative is a terrible idea, just makes his subconscious deeper. We need the opposite: the shallowest dream we can get. Keep his subconscious from getting too much control.” 

Arthur blinked at him. “That’s…a good point. Huh.”

“God, I love that condescension so much. When I dream, I always hope that’s what I’ll dream about: you being condescending to me.” 

“He’ll make it for us,” Arthur said. 

Eames, as usual, immediately leaped right back onto the right conversational track. “How?”

“He’s a chemist. He’ll figure it out.” 

“We don’t need him, Arthur. We know other chemists. Chemists who specialize in dreamsharing.”

“Which will be the problem. Which was _my_ problem. They’ll be thinking about things the conventional way when this is anything but.”

“Yusuf is—”

Arthur shook his head impatiently. “You trust Yusuf? Who accepted Cobb’s share of the payment to not warn us about the fact that he was putting us into a dream environment that might send us to limbo? You trust _anyone_ from that job except for me?”

“No,” said Eames, and looked almost pitying. “But trust is _your_ problem, not mine. And Yusuf’s good at what he does—”

“Do you keep in touch with Yusuf?”

“Of course I do. I’m friends with Yusuf.”

Arthur closed his eyes for a moment, thinking of Yusuf withholding important information about their likelihood of making it out of the dream in exchange for a bit more money. Friends didn’t put friends in the position of possibly dying for a little extra cash. “Christ, Eames, your definition of ‘friend’ is so alarming.”

“I think I’ve had enough judgment today of the sorry state of my personal life,” Eames said sharply. 

Which made Arthur open his eyes, remembering Sherlock’s assessment of Eames’s absent father, absent mother, abandonment issues... “I didn’t mean that.” 

Eames looked harshly displeased and…withdrawn. Arthur had never realized until that moment how open Eames always was with him. Eames gave that impression to everyone, of course, it was part of his façade, but Arthur suddenly realized that it was different with him because now he was seeing the difference. “Doesn’t matter,” Eames said lightly but not the way he usually sounded at all. 

Arthur inhaled deeply and glanced up and down the street and tried to think of what to say to make it better. Eames made him crazy, made him want to alternately kill him and kiss him, and Arthur was desperate not to have it any other way; Eames was the only person he’d ever met on the planet who made him feel always so forcefully _alive_. 

Finally he decided there was nothing he could say to make it better. This was an area at which he decidedly did not excel. This was why he was hopelessly single and resigned to pining endlessly over some larger-than-life Casanova character. It was how he’d ended up helplessly following Cobb, a man who was having a nervous breakdown, with no idea what he could do to stop it or him or even himself. His interpersonal relationship skills were _atrocious_. 

Arthur put his hands in his pockets and continued to look up and down the street, sure they were being watched and trying to spot the spies. He said, “Yusuf’s married now with a very pregnant wife. Do you want him to get involved?”

“I don’t want to get _anyone_ involved in this, Arthur. _I_ don’t even want to be involved.” Eames sounded tired now but not actively angry, which Arthur decided was an improvement.

“You could make a run for it,” Arthur suggested, still looking up and down the street. 

“I wouldn’t get anywhere; we’re being watched right now and you know it. Besides, I wouldn’t do anything that would jeopardize your family, and don’t insult me by suggesting it.”

Arthur looked at him for a moment and considered the fact that his family made him vulnerable and Eames hadn’t even blinked about it, Eames who could have got himself out of this so easily if it hadn’t been for protecting _Arthur_. Arthur said, “You’re right about letting him in the dream. That’s insanity. I should never have thought it.” 

“Oh Christ, Arthur,” Eames half-snarled at him, clearly angry again, “don’t fucking _apologize_ to me. I’m fine. It’s fine. I don’t actually need you to stroke my ego.”

Mistake, Arthur thought, being _nice_ to him. “No, you do that pretty well on your own,” Arthur agreed, and suddenly had an idea and pulled out his notebook and started scribbling in it.

“What are you writing?” asked Eames suspiciously.

“What time is it?” Arthur asked calmly. 

Eames glanced at his watch. “11:23. Why?”

“I’m making a note of the moment when you had a good idea,” said Arthur, and tucked the notebook back into his coat, determinedly being as breezily condescending as he could manage. In honesty, he never _strove_ to be condescending. Apparently it just happened naturally. “Well done, Eames. I’m mildly impressed that you had a decent thought. Now you can spend the rest of the afternoon flirting with someone in an attempt to lure them off to a sordid room somewhere, and I’m going to take your good idea and make it really, _really_ good and use the genius chemist we’ve been given.” Arthur looked at him sunnily and pulled open the door to the building. 

Eames said, after a moment, “Has anyone ever told you how _very_ lethal your charm is, darling? Truly, I am felled by it. Sprawled at your feet.” 

He said it with his usual good humor, and Arthur, halfway through the door, looked back at him, relieved. 

He must have smiled, because suddenly Eames’s thumb brushed up against what Arthur knew was his right dimple. It was there-and-gone, blink-and-you-missed-it, but Eames murmured, as he moved past him into the building, “The dimples are bloody lovely. You’re an idiot.” 

Arthur’s breath stuttered in his chest, idiotically, all because Eames had for one flash of a second _touched_ his _face_ with those _hands_ , and he said, so that he wouldn’t stand in the doorway all day staring into space reliving the moment, “Fuck off.”

Eames, already halfway up the stairs, laughed. “Marmalade,” he said, and paused on the landing and looked down at him. “Come along, love. I’m very much looking forward to finding out what happens next in this circus of a dreamshare we’re running here.” 

Arthur thought he was smiling again as he made his way up the stairs, but decided not to bite it away until he got to the apartment. He seldom let himself smile, and sometimes it just felt so incredibly _good_. 

***

Sherlock peered curiously out the window at the two criminals arguing outside their door and said, “What do you think they’re talking about?” 

John suppressed his urge to hit Sherlock, the way he always suppressed that urge. Well. Almost always, he amended. “I think they’re talking about how you’re an idiot,” John informed him. 

Sherlock gave him an offended look. 

“You’re not going into a dream, Sherlock,” John said, and he knew his voice sounded very calm, because that was how his voice got when he was very angry. “I don’t even understand how that would be _possible_ , but I know you’re not doing it.” 

“It’s science, John,” Sherlock informed him crisply. “Chemistry. Access to the subconscious. You’re a doctor. Surely you’ve considered the power of dreams? How much you could achieve if you could access other people’s dreams?”

“Yeah, about as much as I could achieve if I just started breaking into everybody’s houses and stealing their most precious possessions.” 

“We’re not talking about invading just anyone, John. We’re talking about _Moriarty_.”

“Which is exactly why I don’t want you involved. Good things do not happen when you’re involved with Moriarty. I get kidnapped and strapped to Semtex when you get involved with Moriarty.”

A flash of guilt flitted across Sherlock’s face, which John only noticed because he knew Sherlock so very well. Sherlock said, “But what we’re doing now is getting rid of him forever.” 

John inhaled deeply to keep himself calm. “If Mycroft has him then Mycroft should just get rid of him. Why are we playing around with his head first?” 

“Because don’t you want to know what he knows, John?” Sherlock asked eagerly. 

“No,” John said. “I just want to be rid of him.” 

“Look, I’m sure going into a dream isn’t difficult or dangerous. Those two manage to do it.” Sherlock swept his hand dismissively toward the street. 

John said, “If it’s easy, why is it a secret?”

Sherlock shrugged. “The government keeps everything a secret. You know how Mycroft is. Shh, now, they’re coming back.”

John listened to the front door open and then close, steps on their staircase, and sighed. He wasn’t sure that he hadn’t preferred it when Sherlock had been bored out of his skull. 

Eames walked in and beamed at them radiantly and said, “Arthur and I are in complete and utter disagreement.” 

Arthur had a long-suffering look to him that John recognized perfectly well. He said, “Go pick out another cookie, Eames,” and walked toward John and Sherlock. 

“They’re biscuits,” Eames corrected him. 

Arthur said, “We need a chemist.” 

“Excellent,” Sherlock said, and practically clapped his hands with glee. “When do we go into the dream?”

“You’re not going into the dream,” Arthur said. 

Sherlock’s face fell. “What?”

“Good,” said John. “At least somebody here is behaving sensibly.” 

“Look,” Eames said, around the biscuit he’d stuffed in his mouth, “your brother’s not the nicest bloke on the planet. He kidnapped us to get us to do this at all, and then Arthur had to be his very scariest to even get him to bring us here to _talk_ to you. If we bring you into the dream with us, I suspect he will divest us of parts of our bodies we’re actually fond of.” 

Sherlock’s eyes narrowed. “My brother kidnapped you?”

“He does that,” John said sympathetically. 

“It was stupid of him,” Arthur said, having sat absently in Sherlock’s chair and scribbling in his notebook. “He could have just negotiated with us.” 

“I don’t think the government negotiates with criminals,” remarked John. 

Arthur gave him a narrow-eyed look and then wrote something down in his notebook. 

“Anyway, negotiation would have been much too dull for Mycroft. Mycroft likes to do things as overdramatically as possible,” said Sherlock. 

“Could never tell the two of you are brothers,” said Eames casually. 

John almost loved Eames in that moment. His lips twitched of their own accord. 

Sherlock gave Eames his _why-can’t-I-kill-people-with-just-a-look_ look. Then he said to Arthur, “I’ll talk to Mycroft and go into the dream with you.” 

“We don’t need you in the dream.” Arthur had leaned back in the seat now, was sitting with his ankle propped on his knee, looking very comfortable and at home. “We need that equipment in there.” Arthur pointed toward the kitchen. 

Eames followed the direction he was pointing, poked his head in the kitchen. 

Sherlock said, “For what?”

Eames said, “Interesting culinary approach. Think you could use it to make a bouillabaisse, Arthur?” 

Arthur said, “Dreamsharing is based around a chemical compound known as Somnacin. But not just straight. Straight Somnacin will not achieve what you need it to achieve. Frequently dreamsharing chemists create custom mixes.”

Eames sat down in John’s chair, stretching his legs out to cross his ankles, and said, “The particular combination can affect the quality of the dream, the stability, how easily you can get kicked out of it.” 

“Kicked out of it?” John echoed. 

Eames looked at Arthur. 

Arthur glowered at him briefly, then said, “We’ll demonstrate later.”

“So you want me to create some kind of custom blend,” Sherlock concluded. 

“Moriarty’s a special case.”

John snorted. “That’s one way of putting it.” 

Arthur looked between them closely. “How much do you know about him?”

“Well, Sherlock plays delightful little games with him in which people get killed and I get bombs strapped to my chest.” 

Sherlock heaved a dramatic sigh of disapproval. 

After a moment of silence, Eames said, “I take it back. You lot are going to be right at home in dreamsharing.” 

Arthur said, “Moriarty’s subconscious is driving people insane.” 

“Is that something that happens?” asked Sherlock, with interest. 

“No,” Arthur answered. “Never.”

“What’s he doing to make that happen?” asked Sherlock, still sounding so bloody intrigued. 

John wanted to scream in frustration. 

“We have no idea,” said Arthur. 

“Interesting,” breathed Sherlock. “So that’s what you’re trying to find out?”

“No, we don’t give a fuck how he’s doing it,” said Eames. “We just want to find a way to make sure it doesn’t happen to _us_.”

“Eames and I don’t intend to go insane in Moriarty’s head, you see,” added Arthur. 

“Moriarty’s head _is_ insane,” said John. “You’re mad to be trying this, any of you. And for _what_? How many people has Mycroft sent in there already? Must be a lot for him to be kidnapping criminals. And who bloody cares about what insanity is in Moriarty’s head. Just leave it. Just lock him up and throw away the key.” 

“I am _delighted_ with that approach,” said Eames to Arthur. “Let’s make Dr. Watson the point man on this.”

“Mycroft seems very set on getting into his head,” said Arthur. “He claims there are matters of national security depending on the information locked away in there.” 

“He’s right,” said Sherlock swiftly. “He’s absolutely right, John. This is a matter of _Queen_ and _country_.”

“Bloody hell,” mumbled John, and pushed his hands through his hair, knowing both when he was being manipulated and when there was little he could do about it. The force of Sherlock _and_ Mycroft being unexpectedly on the same side for once was too exhausting to contemplate. 

Sherlock gave him the most alarmingly cherubic look. 

Arthur said, “We want to keep Moriarty’s subconscious from grabbing hold too tightly. We need a shallow dream. It’s the opposite of what we’d usually try for, but Eames suggested it and I think he’s right.”

“It was one of the few times I’ve had a decent idea,” interjected Eames. “Arthur made a note of it. 11:23 a.m.”

John couldn’t quite tell if he was joking or not. 

“So you want him to be asleep, but just barely,” said Sherlock thoughtfully, tilting his head. 

“Exactly. You know those dreams you have where you feel like, actually, they weren’t dreams at all, you were living them, you don’t feel like you slept at all and can’t quite tell where reality ended and sleep began? We need that kind of dream.”

Sherlock said, after a moment, “I don’t dream.”

“Everyone dreams,” said Arthur evenly. 

“Except for dreamsharers,” Eames added. 

“John dreams,” Sherlock said. “We can test it on him.”

“No,” said John. “ _No_. Sherlock—”

“Oh, fine,” Sherlock huffed. “Spoilsport.” 

“Look, Eames and I will test it, we’re used to that, we’ll know when we have what we want.” 

“And I’ll help,” said Sherlock. 

“Sherlock,” John sighed. 

“If you help,” remarked Eames mildly, “we’ll get to find out what it is you dream about.” Eames looked over at Sherlock evenly. 

John looked at Sherlock curiously. He had to admit that a piece of him did see the appeal of trying to get into that particular subconscious. What _was_ Sherlock thinking, in the recesses of his mind palace? John knew he gave the impression of saying whatever came into his head, and John also knew that decidedly wasn’t true. 

“Can you get me some of this Somnacin?” asked Sherlock, after a moment. 

“Your brother can get you some easier than we can,” Eames said, and stood, as if that was the end of the interview. 

“You want me to talk to Mycroft?” demanded Sherlock, sounding alarmed. 

“You think we’re going to be able to convince him that you’re our new chemist?” countered Eames. 

Sherlock mumbled something under his breath and stalked into the kitchen. 

Arthur and Eames both looked at John expectantly. 

“This is going to be a bloody mess,” John told them brightly. “Hope you’re pleased with yourselves.”

“We excel with messes,” said Eames, “don’t we, petal?”

Arthur said, “It’s not going to be a mess. He’s a good chemist, isn’t he?”

“Moriarty’s a lunatic. You don’t know what you’re dealing with.”

“I don’t half-ass my research, you know,” Arthur said shortly. “I don’t send a team into a dreamshare without knowing what I’m dealing with. If you want to talk Mycroft out of this, please, be our guest. Eames and I would be delighted. Until then, I’m making the best of a terrible situation, which is something I happen to be really fucking good at. I’m not going to let anything happen to anybody here. He’s going to mix a few chemicals together for us, and then Eames and I will handle the rest. And, though I would be flattered, I don’t think you really care overly much if Eames and I go insane while doing this. So relax. I’m going to take care of your boyfriend.”

“He’s not my boyfriend,” said John. 

“Oh,” said Arthur, after a moment. “Right.”

He made it sound as if he didn’t believe that for a second, and John frankly wondered why he still bothered denying it. 

Eames said, “Well, regardless, Arthur will take excellent care of him. Arthur’s really a stellar mother hen.” 

“Fuck off,” Arthur told him darkly. 

“Marmalade, love,” Eames beamed at him. 

Arthur stalked out of the flat. 

“He _adores_ me,” Eames informed John, and winked. “Thank you so much for the biscuits and the tea. I’m sure we’ll be seeing you soon.”


	8. Chapter 8

Chapter 8

Arthur was standing on the pavement when Eames stepped out of 221 Baker Street. 

“So what do you think?” Eames asked him pleasantly. 

“I think I hate this stupid fucking job,” Arthur answered passionately. 

“I meant what you thought about whether or not you and I are expected to obediently take the Tube back to our hotel prison, but your thought is a good one, too.” 

“Your idea’s a good one. Sherlock’s a good chemist who knows Moriarty, and he’ll be an invaluable resource, but John doesn’t want anything to do with any of this and that’s a red flag to me because John is not someone who necessarily avoids dangerous situations.”

“No, he didn’t strike me that way,” Eames agreed, settling his hands in his pockets. The poker chip was comfortingly there, and he closed a fist around it. “But do we have options?” 

“This is why Mycroft kidnapped us instead of hiring us. If he’d hired us, I would have refused to let us do this.” 

“Would you have refused to do inception, if you’d known about the sedative and limbo?”

“I don’t know. No. I probably would have done it. But I would have made sure everyone knew going in. So that we’d know what we were facing. I don’t like not knowing what we’re facing.” 

“Right, but luckily for you improvisation is where I excel.” 

“Eames, when having to come up with a fake conversational topic for us, you chose _butterflies_.”

“I like to keep people guessing, darling.” 

Arthur sighed heavily. Someday, thought Eames, he was going to lean in close enough to catch that exhalation in his mouth. 

Eames was distracted enough by that thought that he barely noticed the car pulling up. Then Mycroft stepped out of it, so Eames had to leave off his fantasy. 

“I trust you got what you needed?” Mycroft asked Eames. 

Oh, Christ, the forgery. In the chemist discussion, Eames had forgotten all about it. “I…could do well enough.” He actually wasn’t sure of that. Sherlock was difficult to get a handle on. But Eames was going to worry about that after they had an actual compound in hand. In the meantime, he would have enough interaction with Sherlock that he would get a better handle on him. 

“The more important thing is that your brother’s a chemist,” said Arthur, and Eames had to give him points for blunt straightforwardness. 

“Arthur, don’t beat around the bush,” Eames told him, “it’s a dreadful habit you have.” 

“What does that have to do with anything?” Mycroft frowned. 

“We need a chemist. We need a special, very delicate solution of Somnacin to get this right. Your brother’s going to make it for us.”

Mycroft’s frown deepened. “That wasn’t the deal.”

“The deal was that we do this job for you and you don’t ruin our lives. This is the best way to do the job.” 

“We have chemists for you to work with—”

“Oh, come off it,” said Arthur. “Your brother’s a genius. I’m not working with whatever terrible, subpar chemists have been managing to get all of your dreamsharers driven insane. Not when I have your brother.” 

“I don’t want him involved,” Mycroft bit out. “I told you that. He’s obsessed with Moriarty, and it’s unhealthy, and you were supposed to just go and observe him so Eames could forge him.”

“He’s obsessed with Moriarty, and that’s exactly why I want him involved. He knows Moriarty better than anyone, so he’s our best shot at getting this right, and I need to get this right the first time, don’t I? Now is this our ride back to the hotel, or are we going to stand here arguing on the street about the questionable activities you have us engaged in?”

Mycroft looked furious. Arthur looked calmly unruffled, and Eames loved him like this, loved the way he got calmer and sleeker and more confident the more people around him lost their temper. This, he thought, was when he’d first fallen for Arthur, in Rio, surrounded by chaos, shouting, rolling-pin-wielding grandmothers and miffed marks and incompetent chemists, and Arthur, not a hair out of place, cleaning up every mess. Eames had wanted to see if he could ruffle him in that moment, and he’d been spending the rest of their ensuing acquaintance trying to do just that. 

Eames said, “Hey, you got off easy, mate: your lunatic brother immediately wanted in on the dream.”

Which made Mycroft look _thunderous_ , and he stalked off into 221 Baker Street without another word.

Arthur gave him a look that contained the barest hint of dimples and then got into the car. Eames took a deep breath, telling himself not to slide into the car after him and push him back against the seat and kiss him, fuck him, _ruffle_ him. 

Then he braced himself and slid in after him. And said to the driver, “Do you _have_ to take us back to the hotel, or can we stop for a bite to eat first?” 

***

“You didn’t stop this?” Mycroft demanded, and John was both relieved to have Mycroft on his side and annoyed to be berated for what had just happened. 

“I tried,” John snapped. “Maybe you should have given us a bit more information on what’s going on with the Moriarty situation.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” complained Sherlock, looking up briefly from his microscope. “It’s nothing but a _chemistry experiment_. I do those all the time.” 

Mycroft frowned. “Do you think I don’t know you? You’re going to use the chemist thing as a means to leverage yourself into getting into Moriarty’s brain. You know what this is, don’t you? This is Moriarty luring you in again.” 

Sherlock mirrored Mycroft’s frown. “No, it isn’t,” Sherlock snapped. 

“He’s right,” John contributed, barely keeping his annoyance leashed, and Mycroft looked at him in surprise. “It isn’t Moriarty luring him in. It’s _you_.” 

Mycroft looked highly offended in that way that only Mycroft Holmes could achieve. “ _Me_?” 

“You. If you would drop this, then—”

“Do you know the information Moriarty has in his head?” Mycroft cut him off. “Do you know how many _lives_ we could save with the information that he has? We’ve tried everything we can think of to get at it. This is our last chance.”

“Working with ruthless criminals?” John lifted an eyebrow. “This is what you’ve decided to do?”

“Desperate times,” Mycroft said. “And we are all of us criminals under the right circumstances, aren’t we, Dr. Watson?” Mycroft gave him a meaningful look. 

John thought of his illegal gun and also of a cabbie, bleeding out on the floor. It was on the tip of his tongue to argue self-defense, to point out how justified it had all been, and then he thought maybe it was wiser to just leave the point alone. 

Sherlock took the opportunity to jump back in. “If this is your last chance then don’t you think you should give it the greatest probability of success? Your dreamsharers—who, as I understand it, are the absolute experts in their field—seem convinced that Moriarty will only share his secrets with _me_. Are you really going to depend on a pale imitation when you could have the real thing to make sure it all goes to plan?”

“First, Sherlock, imitating people is what Eames does, and he’s very good at it, so I hardly think we need _you_ to ensure success. Second, Moriarty’s driving people mad, Sherlock. They go into his brain and they come out so shattered that we have to sedate them just to help them find peace. Do you really want to expose yourself to that?” 

Sherlock scoffed. “Do you really think I’d be so stupid as to fall for whatever it is they’re falling for that’s making them mad? Anyway, your clever dreamsharers are finding a way around that. It involves a special solution of Somnacin, which you should get me so that I can engineer it to make sure that this all goes according to plan.”

“The government has chemists, Sherlock,” Mycroft said. 

“Idiot chemists,” Sherlock corrected. 

Mycroft took a deep breath and looked at John. 

But John shook his head. “I am not happy about any of this, and you brought it on yourself. If I had Moriarty, I’d just bloody kill him.” 

“Because you’re thinking of you and Sherlock,” snapped Mycroft. “I’m thinking of this country. I’m thinking of the _world_.”

“Bully for you,” John told him scathingly. 

Mycroft looked as if he thought neither of them worth the effort to continue to deal with and stalked his way down the stairs. 

John leaned against the kitchen doorway, arms crossed, and listened to him go. 

Sherlock looked over at him warily. “It’s just a chemistry experiment, John.”

“Mycroft’s right. You’re determined to rush headlong into Moriarty’s head.”

“Nothing’s going to happen,” Sherlock assured him impatiently. 

“Yeah,” John agreed drily. “Because you’ve always had everything with Moriarty totally under control.” 

Sherlock at least looked abashed, fiddling with the slide on his microscope, but John decided there was nothing more to be gained by arguing about it at the moment. He shook his head at him and dropped onto the sofa in the sitting room and turned on _Top Gear_ very loud so as to annoy Sherlock as much as possible. 

***

It was Eames who suggested they stop for lunch in the hotel’s restaurant. There was no obvious security detail on them, and Eames thought they should test the boundaries of their freedom. It was lunchtime, and they had to eat, so Arthur raised no objection, which was how he found himself sitting opposite Eames watching him peruse a wine list. 

“What do you prefer?” Eames asked. 

Arthur was wondering if Eames knew about wine. Arthur was realizing that he had no idea because he and Eames had basically never shared a meal like this. They had shared lots of hasty meals while working, scarfing down sandwiches while standing next to each other, poring over dream blueprints. They had never sat down to a meal with the luxury of ordering a bottle of wine. Unless you counted the meal with Mycroft, which Arthur definitely did not. 

“Do they have a Nebbiolo?” he asked. 

Eames’s eyebrows lifted as he studied the wine list. “Good choice. Yes, they do. And oh, look, excellent, it’s expensive. We are definitely charging this to the room.” He put the wine list down and looked around for a waiter. 

Arthur watched him, feeling oddly daring. Which was not to say that he’d never drunk with Eames before, because he had, plenty of times. But this felt so dangerously, thrillingly close to a _date_. If Arthur squinted just the right way, he could almost make himself believe it was. 

“Where did you develop a taste for Nebbiolo?” Eames asked. 

“Alba,” Arthur replied. “I ate lots of chocolate and drank lots of wine.” 

“And yet retained your girlish figure.” 

“Well, there was also a lot of hand-to-hand combat in that job.”

“Be still, my heart,” said Eames, as the waiter arrived. “That Nebbiolo, _grazie_ ,” he said, and the waiter looked annoyed at the Italian but hurried off. 

“Where did you develop a taste for Nebbiolo?” Arthur asked. 

Eames sighed a bit, relaxing fully back into his seat. Arthur felt himself relax backward in response. “A lovely little town on the Po River. I was seducing the daughter of a local vineyard owner. And the son.”

“You know that I know you’re lying about most of your conquests?”

“Tell me, love, is it sad to go through life such a committed cynic?” asked Eames earnestly. 

Arthur smiled at him. Partly because he couldn’t help it and partly because he’d decided to squint and treat this as a date and, fuck, he hadn’t even had any wine yet and he was behaving like an idiot. 

The waiter arrived with the Nebbiolo and made a great show of presenting it to them and letting them taste it. Arthur hadn’t had Nebbiolo since the job in Alba, really. It brought him immediately back to the unique chaos of that particular job. 

“Steak again?” Eames asked him, and Arthur realized he hadn’t even looked at the menu. 

“Yes. Fine. Medium.” He couldn’t really care less what he ate, frankly. 

Eames said, “Rare. As in ‘still alive on my plate.’ Not literally. But you follow the metaphor, I trust?” Eames smiled sunnily at the waiter. 

“He hates you,” Arthur informed him as the waiter moved away with an eye-roll. 

“Nonsense. That’s exactly how people behave right before they succumb to my inimitable charm.”

“‘Inimitable’ is the most perfect adjective for your charm that I’ve ever heard.”

“Thank you, petal. Make a note of it, won’t you?”

Arthur thought he was now grinning at Eames, as he dutifully took out his notebook and wrote in it _Eames – inimitable charm_. Then he replaced the notebook, leaned back in his seat again, sipped his excellent wine, and looked across at his lunch companion. He felt really quite dangerously content with his lot in life, despite the fact that he was currently being held hostage by a frightening government operative who wanted him to take a job that might drive him insane. 

“So,” began Eames, “do you think Sherlock will—”

Arthur shook his head, and Eames stopped talking and looked at him curiously. 

Arthur said, “Let’s not talk about the job. Let’s talk about anything but this fucking job.”

Eames’s eyebrows lifted. “Really? You’re going to take a lunch off? I don’t think I’ve ever seen you take a lunch off.” 

“If these are my last few days of sanity, I’m enjoying them,” Arthur replied. 

“Fair enough. What shall we talk about instead?” 

Arthur had no idea. He looked across at Eames, tongue-tied. This, he thought, was why he didn’t go on dates.

“Okay,” Eames said into his silence, sounding amused. “I’ll go first. You’re stranded on a desert island. One book, one movie, one record, one television show.” 

“This is what you want to talk about?” 

“You didn’t have a better suggestion, did you?” Eames pointed out and sipped his wine. 

He hadn’t. Arthur considered, annoyed. This wasn’t really his type of thing. “Oh, fuck, I don’t know. What’s the longest book you know?” 

“The Bible?” Eames guessed. 

Arthur frowned. “Well, I don’t want to bring the Bible with me.” 

“You’re overthinking,” Eames said. “What’s your favorite book?”

“ _Casino Royale_ ,” answered Arthur, without trying to think of something more impressively literary than that. 

“Good choice,” Eames smiled at him, as if he approved. 

“What’s yours?” asked Arthur. 

“ _À la recherche du temps perdu_ ,” responded Eames, deadpan. 

Arthur laughed. “Fuck off,” he said. 

Eames smiled into his wine. “How do you know I’m not a huge Proust fan? Shame on you for judging me, darling.” 

“Not fair when I told you my real favorite book when I could have told you _Foucault’s Pendulum_.” 

“It’s _Casino Royale_ ,” said Eames. 

“Yes,” Arthur confirmed. 

“No, it’s my favorite book, too,” said Eames. 

Which struck Arthur momentarily dumb. “Oh,” he said, finally, because he hadn’t expected that. Although he hadn’t really spent a lot of time thinking about whether he and Eames had similar taste in literature. 

“Favorite city?” asked Eames, refilling their wineglasses. 

“Paris,” answered Arthur. 

“ _Mais oui_ ,” said Eames. 

“Am I that obvious?” 

“I’ve seen you in Paris. And I’ve seen you in lots of places that aren’t Paris. You’re different in Paris.” 

“I used to dream about Paris,” Arthur said, and had no idea why he was telling Eames this, he’d had one fucking glass of wine, he had no excuse. “When I was a kid. It seemed like the most exotic, far away place I could imagine. As opposite my life as you could get. People in Paris weren’t _people_ , they were models and they drank good wine and smoked sexy cigarettes and ate delicious cheeses and croissants and baguettes and they wrote in charming little cafes on seventeenth-century cobblestones and they spoke _French_. It doesn’t often happen.” 

“What doesn’t?”

“That the things you dream about turn out to be better. Paris was better. Paris was everything and _better_. Whenever I’m having a bad day, I think to myself, _You got to see Paris. As soon as this is over, you can buy yourself a plane ticket and go see it again_. And then I feel better.” Eames was looking at him oddly, and Arthur felt foolish and self-conscious and shrugged a little bit and said, striving for lightness, “What can I say? The first time I saw Paris, I fell in love.” 

“It’s the best way to see Paris,” said Eames. “Seeing it for the first time.”

“ _That Touch of Mink_ ,” Arthur recognized the quote. 

Eames smiled at him. “How did I never realize you read good books _and_ watch good movies? Arthur, you have been holding out on me, love. I should have guessed, though. I knew you loved Paris, and I always thought that was so fascinating about you. I would have thought…Hong Kong, maybe. Or Dubai. Somewhere sleek and modern and new. But no, you love Paris, and then I started thinking of how everything you wear is so terribly impeccable and this odd, little blend of modern and classic and completely unexpected, and your bloody ties are the most interesting things I’ve ever seen.” 

Arthur was worried he was blushing. “They’re just ties, Eames.” 

“You don’t get to look at you wearing them all the time,” said Eames. 

Arthur poured out more wine and said, to get the subject away from this intimacy he’d introduced, “What’s your favorite city? And if you fucking say Paris, I’ll throw this wine over your head.” 

Eames laughed. Sometimes Eames laughed for show, not really amused but keeping to his part, but he laughed now genuinely. Arthur loved that sort of laugh out of Eames, and he never could remember it as accurately as he wanted to. “It isn’t Paris. Although I’m fond of Paris, because Paris is _Paris_ , and only unromantic fools don’t like Paris. I don’t really have a favorite. I like a lot of them, for different reasons. I like New York because I sold my first forgery in New York. I like San Francisco because I shagged my first bloke in San Francisco. I like Buenos Aires because my first dreamshare was in Buenos Aires. I like Vienna because it’s lovely.” Eames shrugged, then said, surprising Arthur, “I like here because I grew up here.” 

Arthur hadn’t expected him to say that. Eames had had an unhappy childhood, but Arthur supposed you were partial to anything that felt even the slightest bit like home, when you led the sort of lives Arthur and Eames led. Arthur took a sip of his wine and said carefully, “So you grew up in London?”

Eames gave him a look. “Don’t pretend you don’t know all about it.”

“Eames,” said Arthur, on a little sigh. “It’s what I _do_. It’s my _actual job_.” 

“I know. I’m not angry with you over it. I’m just saying: Don’t insult me by pretending you don’t know everything about it.” 

“I don’t know everything about it,” Arthur said. “I know the bare-bones facts. I know the Wikipedia entry of your life. I don’t know anything about _you_ in it.” 

Eames looked at him for a moment then said, “It’s why I don’t research the people I have to forge too heavily before getting to know them.”

“What is?”

“You learn more by hearing about a person’s life straight from the person’s mouth.” 

The steaks arrived, and Arthur cut into his and tried to determine if the atmosphere at the table had turned awkward and stilted. He said, eventually, “Tell me about forgery. Dream forgery.”

Eames glanced at him. “What about it?”

“What’s it like? To be able to just… _do_ that?”

Eames considered. “I don’t know, it’s… When I was a kid, I used to look in the mirror sometimes, and I used to wonder why I couldn’t be somebody else, anybody else. And now I can. It’s like finally looking in the mirror and seeing someone completely different looking out at you and realizing you can do _anything_.” 

“It sounds amazing,” said Arthur, sounding wistful without really meaning to. 

Eames lifted an eyebrow at him. “You’re jealous of forgery?”

“Of course I’m jealous of forgery. Isn’t everybody jealous of forgers?” 

“Not in my experience. You can build, create an entire world inside a dream, make it everything you wish it to be and hold it all together. I can’t think big picture like that, can’t get it all to come together. I’ve always been jealous of _that_.”

“Oh, that’s nothing.” Arthur waved his hand. “That’s just organization. That’s a few streets here, a few trees there, a mountain or a lake or a skyscraper or two and you’re done. There’s only so much you can do. And then after that you’re still just you. Dream after dream after dream, just you.” 

Arthur knew Eames was looking at him and wished he hadn’t said anything at all and concentrated on eating his steak. 

“You’re not dreaming the right sort of dream,” Eames said, finally. 

Which made Arthur bristle. “Right. Yes. Of course. Thank you for pointing out that there’s something wrong with my subconscious.” 

“I’m not saying…” Eames sounded frustrated, paused, started over. “I’m saying, when you dream, you should—”

“I don’t dream,” Arthur snipped at him, and then wished he hadn’t. 

Eames regarded him. 

Arthur felt vaguely panicked that now Eames was going to think that he should stop dreamsharing, retire, fix the damage he’d done (which had been done too long ago to even _matter_ now). “I mean, I dream sometimes still, but not as much, not nearly as much as— Do you still dream?” He was annoyed, because surely he wasn’t _unusual_. 

“Yes. Sometimes. Not as much as I used to. Don’t you use the PASIV?”

“For what?” asked Arthur, uncomprehending. 

“To dream.”

“No.” Arthur shook his head. “And end up some ridiculous addict in some dream den somewhere? Never wanting to come out of a dream?” He thought of Dom and Mal, and how it had ruined their lives. 

“Sometimes, depending on your life topside, if you end up wanting to live in a dream because you’re happy there, I’m not sure I think that’s such a terrible end to have reached. But it’s not like that’s some kind of inevitable danger. That’s like assuming you’re an alcoholic because you had some wine at lunch today.”

“You use it,” Arthur concluded. 

“Sometimes, yes. Sometimes don’t you just get tired of… Sometimes don’t you just want to have a _really good dream_?”

_Yes_ , thought Arthur. He did. He wanted to have a spectacular dream. He didn’t want to be running for his life, or fighting for his life, or stealing someone’s secret, or following someone else’s rules. He liked dreamsharing, he would have stopped if he didn’t, but sometimes he just wanted to have a really lovely dream. He heard himself say, “I don’t even know what I would dream about,” and wondered why he couldn’t stop talking. 

“Paris,” said Eames. “Cary Grant. James Bond. Really clever tailors.” 

Arthur smiled because he knew Eames was trying to back them off of the heavy edge the conversation had hit. 

Eames said, “We need more wine,” and gestured to the waiter for another bottle. 

And Arthur didn’t protest.


	9. Chapter 9

Chapter 9

Eames had never known Arthur to talk so much. Then again, Eames had to admit that he’d never sat and tried to have a conversation like this with Arthur. He flirted with Arthur, and he sniped at Arthur, and he mocked Arthur, but Arthur with his half of two bottles of wine in him and with gentle conversational nudges from Eames was the most bloody beautiful thing he’d ever seen. 

Eames told him about his first dreamsharing job, which inspired Arthur to tell him about his first dreamsharing job, which turned into a contest over who could tell the worst dreamsharing story (Arthur won that one handily, mostly because he’d worked way too much with that prick Cobb, in Eames’s opinion). This somehow reminded Eames of the time he had forged a Kandinsky and got it into the Tate Modern, a story that involved him pretending to be Viscount Eames, a distant royal cousin. 

Arthur was collapsed into laughter. Arthur was practically _giggling_ , for Christ’s sake. Eames had seen all seven wonders of the modern world and had seen nothing to hold a candle to Arthur laughing at him in such open delight. 

“Nothing about that story is true,” Arthur gasped. 

“Hand to God,” Eames said, lifting his hand dramatically, “I still get invitations to go to Balmoral for Christmas.”

“You’re so fucking ridiculous,” Arthur wheezed with laughter. 

“I’m just saying, play your cards right and I’ll introduce you to the Queen.”

“What the hell do I want to be introduced to the Queen for?” asked Arthur, wiping tears away from his eyes. 

“So that you can distract her while I steal something of great value.” 

“Fucking ridiculous,” Arthur said again, smiling at him, all bright eyes and dimples, and Eames practically heard the plop of his heart falling out of his chest and at Arthur’s feet. 

Which explained why Eames felt like he couldn’t breathe anymore. He said, “But you’d do it for me.”

“Of course I would. But I’d yell at you about it the whole time.”

Eames tried to be utterly casual, as if he wasn’t palpitating with desire. “I’d expect nothing less. Anyway, the story’s true.” 

“Uh-huh,” said Arthur, shaking his head and smiling and finishing his glass of wine. 

Eames looked from the empty glass to the empty bottle and heard himself say, “Have you been to the Tate Modern?”

“No. I don’t do much sightseeing.”

“Well, come on then.” Eames stood. “I’m going to show you my Kandinsky.” 

No one stopped them, which was how they ended up walking confidently through the Tate Modern, right up to the painting Eames had forged all those years ago. 

He gestured to it, sweepingly. “Ta-da!”

Arthur looked amused. “That’s yours, is it?”

“It is indeed.” Eames looked at it with some pride. “It’s a bloody good one, if I do say so myself.”

“So you expect me to believe you got them to put a forged painting on the walls of the Tate Modern?”

“Yes!” exclaimed Eames. “Your cynicism, Arthur, darling, it really does distress me.” 

“I suppose all of these paintings are your forgeries, huh?”

“Don’t be silly now, love, it’s just that one.” 

Arthur shook his head but looked charmingly indulgent. His dimples were in evidence. Eames had never seen so much of the dimples. He thought it possible he was dimple-drunk. 

“Who’s your favorite artist? I’ll steal you something,” he said impulsively. 

“What, right now?”

“No, it takes a bit of planning to steal something from a museum.”

“It’s Titian,” Arthur told him. 

“Titian,” Eames repeated, and swore. “I’ve taken you to entirely the wrong museum.” 

Arthur was still smiling. “No, this has been quite lovely.”

“You should have told me you preferred Renaissance art.”

“To modern? Who _doesn’t_ prefer Renaissance art to modern?”

“Well, I was going to be alarmed about how good your taste has revealed itself to be all afternoon, but now it turns out you have terrible taste in art, so I feel that the world has righted itself.” 

“I have terrible taste in art because I like _Titian_? He’s a Renaissance _master_.”

Eames shook his head and reached out to steer Arthur back toward the forged Kandinsky. “Did you really look at this painting, darling? I don’t think you did. _Look_ at it.”

“It’s a bunch of colorful shapes, Eames.”

“Right. Yes. _Exactly_.” Eames’s hands closed a bit tighter around Arthur’s shoulders, and he leaned in, speaking into Arthur’s ear. “Look at the _color_. Look at how it’s been freed from the responsibility of being anything other than what it is. It’s been _liberated_. See how dynamic it is? Feel the _rhythm_ of it?” 

Arthur was very still. Eames didn’t even think he was breathing. Eames realized suddenly how close he was standing to him. He looked at his profile out of the corner of his eye, not quite turning his head yet. Because it would be easy to turn his head and plant a very soft kiss behind Arthur’s ear. Arthur would make some kind of delightful noise in reaction, turn his head to look at Eames, and then Eames would kiss him, properly, here in the Tate Modern. It would be _devastatingly_ romantic. 

Except that Arthur took a step away, clearing his throat. Eames dropped his hands from Arthur’s shoulders because he didn’t want to cling to him idiotically. Arthur rolled his shoulders a bit, as if to shake off the ghost of Eames’s touch, and said, “Yes. Well. Mostly it’s just colorful shapes.” 

Eames looked back at the painting. He took a deep breath. He said, “Maybe.” 

***

It was the sort of stolen afternoon Arthur never allowed himself, and he had the most glorious time, and it was embarrassing how dizzy he was over Eames. But at least he knew now how terribly effective Eames’s standard seduction scene was. Eames glowed in a museum, sparkled when he talked about art, and it was _so easy_ to just pretend you were the only person he’d ever done that to before. _I’ll steal you something_ , Eames had said, and Arthur had thought it the sweetest thing he’d ever said to him, and then thought, _Idiot, you know he says it to every single person he lures in with his charming-thief routine._

But Arthur couldn’t help it. He’d kept enough of his head to step away from Eames in the museum but the majority of his head was floating and useless. Arthur thought it was a good thing he’d never let himself indulge this crush before: how would he ever have worked with how _distracting_ the whole thing was? 

They walked back from the museum at first, wandering through the streets. Eames was telling him stories about things he had done in London, typically entertaining stories. Arthur listened and smiled where appropriate, but the whole time he was thinking how each step took them closer to this day being over and then he would have to go back to being professional and put-together and not let his heart throb with every beat. 

Eventually they got a taxi and took it back to the hotel and went up to their suite. They’d been silent in the taxi, silent on the walk through the lobby. 

But Eames spoke as Arthur watched the numbers on the elevator increase. “Aren’t we good little prisoners, coming back to our cell?”

“We were watched every second today and you know it,” said Arthur. “It’s not worth the trouble of making a break for it.”

“I admit I mind the whole thing less if it means that I get to squire you around London’s museums. Next time I’m taking you to the Tate Britain.”

“There won’t be any Titian in the Tate Britain.”

“You’re wrong about Titian. I’m going to show you the great British artists and you’ll see.” 

The elevator door opened. “All of a sudden this job is making you patriotic,” remarked Arthur, amused. 

“I was always a patriot. For hire,” said Eames, stepping out in front of Arthur, and then, “Look what’s here, darling.”

Arthur looked, and then almost clapped his hands with delight, because his PASIV was there, set carefully in the middle of his notes so as not to disturb them. He went over to it and opened it and checked it to make sure everything looked in order. 

“You have an extremely inappropriate relationship with your suitcases, briefcases, luggage, whatever you want to call it,” remarked Eames. 

Arthur ignored him because he didn’t even know what that was supposed to mean. There was a note next to the PASIV, which he picked up and read. 

_If you’re quite done with your date, I thought you could start to get to work tonight. –Mycroft Holmes_

“What’s it say?” asked Eames. 

Arthur tucked it into his coat so as to not bring up the idea that the entire afternoon had been a date and said, “He wants us to get to work tonight.” 

Eames looked amused, as he threw himself onto the couch. “With the PASIV? Doing what?”

“I have no idea. I need to design, and I don’t need the PASIV to do that. You could practice your forgery, I suppose.” 

“I could. I’d need to borrow you so you could gauge how effective it is.” Eames was looking at him with a strange look on his face. 

“What?” Arthur asked suspiciously. 

Eames sat up, indicating that apparently he was taking this conversation very seriously. “You could use it.” 

He didn’t need the PASIV. He was nowhere near that point in his planning yet. “I don’t need it—”

“No. Arthur. You could _use_ it.” 

Arthur suddenly realized what Eames was talking about. But he still said, stupidly, “You mean, to dream?”

“That’s what people do with PASIVs.” 

Arthur regarded the machine hesitantly, unsure. Eames seemed to think spending time running around your own subconscious was just a walk in the park. Arthur wasn’t so sure. 

Eames said, standing, “All right, that settles it, you’re doing this.” 

Arthur looked at him, startled. “I don’t know if—”

“Exactly. I’ve never seen you look that way about anything. I’ve seen a Russian mobster press the barrel of a rifle into your forehead _topside_ and you looked less terrified. Get down.” Eames pressed, and Arthur went, onto the couch, even though he still wasn’t sure. “So you’re doing this. It’s a _dream_. A normal dream, a regular dream, not like the ones we usually create. A dream to like. You’re going to go in there and have fun with it. Later you’ll have to let me know if you still wear a tie in your fun dreams.” Eames was setting up the machine as he spoke, studying the Somnacin, unwinding the IV. 

“I—” said Arthur, although he didn’t know what he wanted to say. What wouldn’t make him sound like an idiot? He should just do this. Other people just _did this_. Why couldn’t he just _do this_? What was _wrong_ with him? Eames was tugging at his sleeve, and Arthur obliged him, taking off his coat, because he didn’t know what else to do, saying, blankly, “Let you know…?”

“Well, I’m not going to go in there with you, obviously.” Eames said, unbuttoning Arthur’s cuff, rolling up his sleeve. “This is for you.” 

Arthur was perfectly capable of doing these things for himself. He couldn’t remember the last time someone else had inserted the needle into his vein. Eames did it easily, effortlessly, slipping it in with nary a pinch. “You’re good at that,” said Arthur, because he didn’t know what else to say. 

“Thank you for that delightful condescension over me being good at something that I’ve done countless times in my life, as you well know,” Eames said. “Your condescension always does reach dizzying new heights. Now you’ll go in there alone for an hour of dreamtime, and I shall stand guard over you by seeing if that Korean soap opera I like is on.” 

Arthur regarded him for a moment. He could go into a dream, he thought, _his_ dream, whatever he wanted it to be, and he could just have _fun_. He’d do it, and when he woke up he would tell Eames it had been fine, and then Eames would stop harping on about this, and Arthur would just move on. Eames was right: One fun dream wasn’t going to hurt him. “Fine,” Arthur relented. “Five minutes.” 

***

Arthur was surrounded by cornfields, stretching out around him in every direction, as far as the eye could see, and it took him only a moment to smile. _Home_. Of course. He hadn’t been consciously thinking of it, but there was something comforting that this was where his subconscious went back to. All the places he’d been and seen, in the end there was still nothing quite like home. He didn’t miss it, exactly, but it was still a place that provoked positive emotions in him. 

Arthur tipped his head back. The sky above was bright blue with a few puffy white clouds. Perfect. But then, he was in control of the whole thing, so that made sense. 

He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, smelling earth and sun and corn, and then he let himself fall backward. The ground caught and held him, as he’d planned, and he sprawled in the cornstalks, folding his hands under his head and crossing his ankles and just basking for a little while. He had done this as a boy, hiding, avoiding, dreaming of places with far-off, exotic names like Paris and Mumbai and Tokyo. Ironic that he had ended up as an adult familiar with all of those places and literally dreaming of the cornstalks. 

Eventually he got to his feet and dusted off his jeans and built himself a barn as he walked toward it, the barn of his childhood. When he walked in, it was as dim as he always remembered it being, the sunlight shifting through the cracks in the wood and dust motes dancing around. It smelled warmly of hay and horse, and he reached a hand toward the first stall, where Oscar, his pony, pressed his nose up against it. 

“Hello there,” Arthur said and smiled at him. He was surprised he’d called him up so thoroughly; he hadn’t thought about Oscar in ages. 

He moved to the next stall, where Indiana, the horse who had replaced Oscar, was. Indy was still around but was old now, and Arthur had dreamed him young and spry, the way he remembered him being when Arthur had been a boy and was first presented with him. Arthur ran a hand down Indy’s white blaze and dreamed himself up a couple of apples to give the horses. And then a couple of sugar cubes. “Got to learn to dream bigger, I’m told,” he told Indy, who seemed to appreciate the sugar cube. Arthur leaned forward to kiss the blaze. 

Then Digger came running in. 

Arthur spent a little while throwing a tennis ball for Digger, and then moved off toward the house. Digger followed behind him, panting; Arthur filled his bowl with water from the hose and Digger gulped it down with the messy splashing Arthur always remembered. _It’s a dream_ , he reminded himself, _it isn’t accurate, it’s just as you remember it_. But that made it nice, better than going back in time, because he could make it entirely perfect. 

Arthur walked through the back door and into the kitchen, which was empty and tidy and had the appliances of his youth, not the modern updates he’d insisted his parents accept a few years ago. He was the one who spearheaded the kitchen change, but his head was recreating it the way it had been before he’d interfered. The thought made him smile yet again, even more, as he walked through the kitchen, trailing his fingers along the table as he went. Eames was right: This was good for you every so often. There was a bowl of perfect strawberries, and he pinched off the top of one and popped it in his mouth as he walked toward the front of the house. 

He fastened a hand on the balustrade and swung himself up and onto the first step the way he used to when he was a kid, and then he walked up the stairs and into his bedroom, which was in the front of the house. 

He stood at the window and looked out over the view he remembered. Everything was quiet. His subconscious was not creating any noise. He reveled in the absolute silence around him and opened the window and perched on the sill and tipped his head against the warm pane, wondering how much time he had left in the dream. He wasn’t wearing a watch. His subconscious was apparently stubbornly on vacation. 

And it was his subconscious, so he wasn’t the least bit surprised when Eames said behind him, “Not what I expected.” 

Arthur didn’t turn to face him. He looked out over the cornfields and said, “Is anything about me ever what you expect?”

Eames in real life would have said something sarcastic at this point, something about how Arthur’s clipped criticisms were always exactly what he expected. Arthur could almost hear it, but it wasn’t what Eames said now, because Arthur was controlling this dream and Eames was just his projection of him, so Eames stepped forward and pressed a kiss to the back of Arthur’s neck, just below his hairline. 

Arthur took a deep breath. “Right,” he said, and looked at the ground below him and contemplated jumping out the window to wake himself up. 

Eames followed his thoughts because Eames _was_ his thoughts. “Arthur,” he said, sounding amused, and Arthur closed his eyes because he wished he was less adept at conjuring up Eames so perfectly, “you’re such an adorable idiot.” 

“Right,” said Arthur, in agreement. “Yes. I know.” 

Eames’s projection pulled, nudged, got Arthur up against the wall by the window, his hands flexing onto Arthur’s hips, holding him in place, crowding him. “This is _your dream_ , and you still won’t let yourself have me.” 

Arthur cursed his dreamsharing expertise, cursed how fucking good he was at all of this, because he could feel Eames’s warmth against him, he could smell his aftershave mingled with the lingering scent of coffee and, slightly, the sweat of the day. 

Arthur looked at Eames’s obscenely full mouth and said, “I can’t,” and he thought he meant, _I can’t do this_ , but apparently he meant, _I can’t_ not _do this_ , because what he did was close his hands into the collar of Eames’s slightly-too-loudly-patterned navy blue shirt and pull him in for a kiss. 

It was Arthur’s dream, so it only made sense that it was the most perfect kiss of his entire life. Eames sank against him, pressing him into the wall, and the weight and pressure of him was delicious. Arthur kept his hands tight in Eames’s collar, keeping him close, while he met the nibble of Eames’s lips, the slide of his tongue. 

And probably Arthur could have kept it all contained, a fantasy of a kiss up against a wall, and it would have been fine, except Arthur, because he was an _idiot_ , because he had wanted to do it for so long and he just _had_ to, pulled Eames’s lower lip into his mouth and bit at it. Eames growled and suddenly Arthur was spun away from the wall, onto the bed, and Eames stretched out over him and licked into Arthur’s mouth, and Arthur had no strength to stop any of it. In fact, Arthur pulled Eames’s shirt out of his pants so he could get at skin. He wanted to touch and taste everything he could before he lost the chance forever. 

Eames shifted, dragging his lips along Arthur’s cheek, down his throat. His stubble scratched along Arthur’s jaw. Arthur left off stroking along Eames’s abdomen in favor of burying his hands into Eames’s hair, pulling until Eames moved back up into another kiss. 

Which he broke again only too quickly, this time to slide over to Arthur’s ear, where he pressed his mouth against the shell and whispered, “I love you.” 

Oh, of _course_ he would, thought Arthur. His projection of Eames would manage to be perfect in the world’s most irritating way. 

Arthur flipped them, easily since it was his dream, and straddled him, leaning over him, a hand bracing himself by Eames’s head. “Say it again,” he heard himself say, which was dreadful, it had been a mistake to let the projection say it in the first place. 

Eames said, “I love you,” and Arthur stared at his face as he said it, tried to lock into his memory every nuance of his expression, his kiss-ruffled hair and kiss-swollen lips and kiss-heavy eyes, before he leaned down and kissed him hard. 

“I love you, too,” he gasped when he pulled back, and this was _stupid_ , it was a _dream_ , but Eames reached for the hem of his T-shirt and Arthur let him, let him pull it over his head and toss it away, and Arthur kissed Eames again, desperate, while his hands worked at the buttons of Eames’s shirt and Eames’s hands closed into Arthur’s hair. “Eames,” Arthur murmured, kissing and kissing and kissing down Eames’s throat and along his chest. “Eames, Eames, Eames,” he kept saying, even though it wasn’t him, but he didn’t let himself think that, he gave himself over to it, let himself go hazy, foggy, light-headed on the taste of Eames’s skin. 

Arthur pressed the flat of his tongue over Eames’s nipple and Eames said, “Arthur, _darling_ ,” and tugged at Arthur’s hair a bit more, and Arthur smiled and nosed into Eames’s breastbone and said, “Say it again.” 

“Arthur, darling,” said Eames a little breathlessly. 

Arthur looked up at him from under his eyelashes, feeling coquettish and yet, amazingly, not at all silly. “Not that. Dick.” 

Eames smiled at him. “I just called you ‘darling,’ twice, and you responded by calling me a dick. That is going to be Exhibit A the next time you try to tell me you’re not mean.”

Arthur smiled back. He couldn’t help it. He pressed a kiss to the skin he was hovering over and then moved up, pulled himself so he could smile directly down at Eames. “I’m not mean,” he said. 

“You could be nicer to me,” said Eames with a grin. 

Arthur arched his eyebrows and shifted his hips meaningfully against Eames, satisfied when his breath caught. Arthur leaned down and nipped at his lips. “I’m very nice to you,” he murmured. 

“You’re mean—and rude—and condescending—” 

Arthur swallowed kisses between the adjectives. 

“—and patronizing—”

“Means the same thing as ‘condescending,’” Arthur mumbled into the kiss. 

Eames groaned. “So _fucking_ annoying,” he said, and kissed back, and then lifted his head, a hand cupped around the back of Arthur’s head to keep him in place. He kissed Arthur’s right dimple, and then he breathed, “And I lo—”

Arthur woke up. 

Arthur woke up and standing over him was Eames, but an entirely different Eames, not an Eames who had just been kissing him and proclaiming his love for him. Arthur blinked, feeling disoriented. 

“Hello,” Eames said, and then tipped his head quizzically, because Arthur was breathing hard, almost gasping. “Hey, all right? Arthur, you’re fine. Breathe, pet. What happened in the dream?”

Arthur pushed Eames away clumsily, tugging messily at the cannula, feeling uncoordinated, almost drunk. When he stood, he almost stumbled. 

“Arthur,” Eames said in surprise, even as he let Arthur push him aside. 

“One minute,” Arthur managed to say. “Give me one minute.” And then he managed to stagger himself into the bedroom and through to the bathroom and closed the door and splashed cold water over his face and just breathed, trying to get his flailing feelings under control. He actually reached into his pocket and tossed the die twice, just to make sure _this_ was real life. It was, of course. His life wasn’t good enough to be that dream. 

_Bad idea_ , he thought, studying himself in the mirror. He didn’t look well-kissed, there was no stubble burn along his jaw, because he hadn’t been kissing Eames just a few seconds before, that had been a dream. It had been a _dream_. And he was suddenly terrified he’d embarrassed himself. His arousal wasn’t evident and hopefully had never been, but Arthur had no idea what he might have _said_. Did he talk in his sleep? He honestly didn’t know. 

Arthur wanted to pace, although there wasn’t a ton of space in the bathroom to do it. Why had he _done_ that? How could he have let that projection get that out of control? Arthur had ruthless control over his projections, that _never_ happened to him, and to let it get that far, to the point where clothing had been removed and I-love-yous had been exchanged… How was he ever going to get that out of his head? He was going to think of it every fucking time he looked at Eames. This was why he didn’t go into dreams for _fun_ , and he was going to fucking strangle Eames for suggesting it. Why had he gone along with it, why had he fallen so easily for Eames’s stupid, _stupid_ lines so that he had thrown caution to the wind and said yes to something he shouldn’t have said yes to? Arthur _never_ did that. 

Arthur cut his thoughts off there evenly, a clean slice. He drew himself up and looked in the mirror again. He fixed his tie and rolled down his sleeves and re-buttoned them and straightened out his vest and felt better. He _was_ better. He was cool and calm and collected the way he always was. Yes. 

Arthur walked back out into the living area of the suite, prepared to tell Eames that it had all been an odd, off-kilter reaction to being pulled out of a dream he’d forgotten was a dream, which never happened to them under usual circumstances. Forgetting you were dreaming was disorienting, and Eames would probably drop it. 

Eames was hooked up to the PASIV, cannula in place, which drew Arthur up short. 

“Oh, are you going under?” Arthur asked him.

“We both are,” said Eames, and indicated the other couch, as if Arthur was going to sit on it and go under. 

“Definitely not,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. I forgot it was a dream, and I never do that, and it threw me—”

“I meant for you to enjoy yourself,” Eames interrupted. “I meant for you to relax and have a bit of fun and when you woke up you were going to be refreshed and ready for another all-nighter.”

“Right,” agreed Arthur. “Absolutely. Exactly what happened.” 

Eames gave him a look and gestured to the couch again. 

“Eames, the dream was boring, you’d hate it, it was—”

“We’re not going into your dream, silly,” Eames said. “We’re going into mine.” 

Which gave Arthur pause. Why did Eames keep surprising him? “Into yours?”

Eames nodded. “I do this more than you, so I’ve got a dream all set and ready to go. I don’t have to build on the fly the way you did. And you’re a bloody perfectionist so I’m sure you gave yourself a hard time that totally wasn’t deserved. So. Come to a ready-made dream and see what it’s like.”

He shouldn’t do this, thought Arthur. He really, really shouldn’t do this. Hadn’t he just been berating himself for letting Eames talk him into something he shouldn’t have done? And here he was hovering on the cusp of doing it again. 

But he was curious. He was so, so _curious_. 

“Okay,” he heard himself say, and there was a piece of him that was staring in alarmed disbelief, but the rest of him moved over to the couch and sat and watched Eames put the needle back in. 

“Five minutes,” Eames told him. “I’m telling you, you’ll feel so much better.”


	10. Chapter 10

Chapter 10

They were in a city. But not really. They were in _every city_ in the world. At least, that was how it seemed to Arthur. There were sleek, brand-new skyscrapers, and there were older, 1970s skyscrapers, and there were brownstones, and there were cute little Victorian gingerbread houses, and that was just what Arthur could see from where he was standing. 

“ _Eames_ ,” Arthur breathed, and he knew he sounded shocked and awed but he was feeling dream-hazy and this dream was _amazing_. “You did all this?” He looked at him in wonder. “I thought you said you couldn’t build.” 

Eames was looking pleased. “I can, a bit. Most of this is from memory, and the vast majority of it was built by others. Whenever I met a good architect, I’d beat them at poker and make them build me another little piece of it. It’s an endless work in progress.” 

“When you say you beat them at poker, do you mean that you cheated?”

“Arthur, darling, you shouldn’t accuse me of things in my very own dream; it’s so rude.” 

Arthur looked to his left, which was all rocky cliffs dropping down to a stormy sea. On his right was a sun-drenched beach. He smiled. “Is that Rio?” 

“There’s a little bit of everything here. You should go explore.” 

“Okay,” Arthur said, because he wanted to see the rest of it. He waited for Eames to lead the way. 

Eames just looked back at him. 

“Well, go on,” Arthur said, and made a nudging motion with his hand. 

Eames shook his head. “Nope. You go wander by yourself. It’s what you need, a little alone time. So go on. I’ll find you before the hour’s up so you’re not jarred out again.” 

“I’ll pay attention this time,” Arthur said, and indeed, there was a watch on his wrist this time around for him to glance at. “But I can’t just wander through your dream without you.”

“Yes, you can. Do whatever you want. Dream up an ice cream cart and buy some ice cream. Dream up a carousel and ride it for a bit.” 

“Eames, your subconscious will know I’m intruding and—”

“They won’t bother you, Arthur.” 

“How can you know that?” 

“Because I know: They won’t bother you.”

Arthur was skeptical, thinking of how wildly out-of-control his Eames projection had gotten. “You’re that good at controlling your projections?” 

“I’m decent. But, more importantly, you’re you.” Eames, his hands in his pockets, started walking away. 

“What is that supposed to mean?” Arthur called after him.

Eames turned, walking backward now, and grinned at him. “Go have fun, darling. Don’t overthink it for once.” 

Arthur, after a moment spent watching Eames walk off down the boardwalk along the beach, decided to take him at his word. He started in front of him, in a portion of the city that reminded him of Bangkok. 

Arthur crawled all over Eames’s city. He poked his head into alleys and wandered through buildings and browsed through shops, astonished by the level of detail. Eames must have spent forever putting this together. There were places where the cities had been patched together imperfectly, cobblestones not quite meeting up with smooth pavement, forcing him to take a step up, or windows wavering because the seams were off. Multiple architects, Arthur thought, being blasé about working with the previous designs. Arthur eventually started smoothing them over for Eames, buoyed by the fact that Eames’s projections not only seemed unbothered by him but actually welcoming. They smiled sunnily at him as he passed by them, called out to ask if they could be of assistance when he browsed through their shops, invited him in for tea if he happened to stumble into their living rooms. Arthur had never seen anything like it. Was Eames just that naturally friendly a person that even his subconscious welcomed visitors? 

There was a prison in the city, a ridiculous pinkish-stone affair that looked like the prison in Monaco. Arthur spent a little while regarding it and wondering what was inside it. The projections didn’t seem alarmed, continued to smile at him as they passed by him, and Arthur wondered if somehow Eames knew that Arthur was never going to break into his prison when he’d been so generously invited into this dream in the first place. 

So Arthur left the prison behind him and kept moving. He bought himself a terrible fedora, mostly because he thought it would amuse Eames, and kept one eye on the time. He still had twenty minutes left when he stumbled upon Eames sitting at a sidewalk café in a little plaza with a fountain that seemed familiar, although Arthur couldn’t place it. Eames spotted him and stayed still as he approached, and then he said, “Where did you get that terrible hat?” 

Arthur took it off and dropped it on Eames’s head before sitting opposite him. “Came from your subconscious.” 

Eames shook his head, taking the hat off and studying it critically. “Absolutely not. You must have smuggled it in on your person.”

“Where are we?” Arthur asked, as the water danced in the fountain and other people moved through the plaza. He tried to place the buzz of conversation, thought it might be French. 

“Aix-en-Provence,” said Eames, putting the hat back on. Shade-dappled sun draped over it and he looked like a perfect scene from some sort of elegant old movie. 

“ _Monsieur_?” inquired someone at Arthur’s elbow, startling him. 

A waiter. “Oh,” Arthur said, “Um. _Un café Americano, s’il vous plait_.” 

“Arthur,” said Eames, sounding maddeningly patient. “You don’t like coffee, and you are in a _dream_. Order whatever you want.” 

Arthur hesitated, looking back at the expectant waiter. “ _Un chocolat chaud_ ,” he ordered, and the waiter just nodded and moved away. 

Eames didn’t comment on it, which relieved Arthur. What Eames said, the eagerness dripping into his tone, was, “Did you like it?” 

Arthur smiled, aware that Eames was looking for a compliment here but also aware that he deserved the compliment. So he said, genuinely, “Eames, this place is amazing. How long have you been working on this?” 

Eames lifted one shoulder in what Arthur was sure he meant to be a casual shrug, although he wasn’t doing an especially good job of hiding how pleased he was by Arthur’s words. “Pretty much since the beginning. The people I worked with at the beginning, they would go down below for fun pretty frequently, so I got the idea from them. I thought it would be a good way to practice building at first, but what it really ended up proving to me was that I don’t like building, so I got other people to do it for me.” Eames shrugged again, and then he lit a cigarette. 

Arthur lifted his eyebrows. 

“No lung cancer in a dream,” Eames pointed out, and blew some smoke out toward the fountain. “Do you want one?” 

Arthur shook his head. 

“Not even in a dream, Arthur,” Eames mocked gently and shook his head a bit. 

Which made Arthur think of Eames’s projection in his own dream, mocking gently over Arthur not letting himself have Eames even in a dream. This was why, thought Arthur, watching Eames’s lips close around the cigarette. This was _exactly_ why. 

The waiter arrived with the drinks, which was a welcome distraction from Eames’s ridiculously lush mouth. Arthur looked at the whipped cream piled high atop his hot chocolate, like it was a fucking ice cream sundae, and gave Eames a look. 

“Seriously?” he said. 

Eames shrugged and took another drag on his cigarette, his eyes twinkling across at Arthur. Arthur hated that he thought things about Eames like that his eyes twinkled, but there you had it. 

“That’s just how they make hot chocolate here,” he said innocently. 

“In your _dream_.” 

“Arthur, calories don’t count in a dream. Drink up, love.” 

“I’m not worried about the _calories_ ,” grumbled Arthur, dipping his spoon into the mound of whipped cream. 

“Arthur, darling, settle back because I’m going to give you a lecture,” announced Eames, leaning back in his chair, a cigarette in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. 

“How did you know that a lecture from you is exactly what I look for in a dream environment?” Arthur drawled at him. 

“Most people dream about me in some way, shape, or form,” Eames rejoined pleasantly. “I thought your ideal dream about me would be me lecturing you like a responsible adult person.” 

That was not his ideal dream about Eames, as he knew, and he hated Eames passionately and concentrated on his whipped cream so as not to give anything away. 

“What I am going to lecture you about,” Eames continued grandly, “is how to be _irresponsible_ , petal. We’re in a dream. We’re in _my_ dream. It’s perfectly safe and under control and nothing’s going to happen, so you don’t need that gun in your holster there, and you don’t need to worry about what I’m going to think when you order hot chocolate instead of coffee because honestly, darling, nothing counts in a dream.”

Arthur swirled at his hot chocolate and thought of Eames in his dream pressing him down into the bed and how it totally and utterly counted because of the fact that it had happened in a dream and not his life. “Dreams count,” he said. “And I have the gun because I’m in your subconscious and you shouldn’t underestimate the violence of other people’s projections.”

“I told you not to worry about that.”

Arthur gave him a look. 

Eames sighed and tapped ash off his cigarette. “Did you have a gun in your own dream?” 

“I did not,” Arthur said truthfully, although he hadn’t realized it until just that moment. 

“Good. At least you did that right,” said Eames. 

Arthur sat away from his hot chocolate, finally annoyed. “There isn’t a right way to dream as opposed to a wrong way to dream.” 

“What were you wearing in your dream?” asked Eames, as if Arthur hadn’t spoken at all. 

“Assless chaps,” Arthur told him. 

Eames blinked at him, looking uncertain. 

“Don’t be an idiot,” Arthur said. “We’re not going to sit here while you _rate_ my dream.” 

“I just want to make sure you weren’t wearing a three-piece suit.” 

“I like my suits. I don’t care what Sherlock said. I like to wear nice clothes. I like to look presentable. I know that makes me boring or stuck-up or whatever it is that you say about me but…whatever.” _Could have finished that stronger, Arthur_ , he told himself, and sipped his hot chocolate to cover, thinking it would be a more effective cover if he weren’t sipping a child’s drink. 

Eames, after a moment of silence, said, “Well, good, because you look delightful in your clothes.” 

Arthur didn’t say anything, because as flirtations from Eames went, it was a half-hearted one at best. Eames flirted with people automatically, thought Arthur sourly. Eames flirted without even knowing he was flirting. And Arthur fell for every single line, the way everyone else Eames met did. 

Then a mime arrived at their table, presenting Arthur with a red balloon with a ridiculous flourish and then embarking on a routine. 

Arthur, having accepted the balloon reflexively, looked from it to the mime to Eames. “Seriously?” he said. 

“Red balloons are cheerful,” said Eames, and blew a perfect smoke ring in Arthur’s direction. 

“What is with your brain, anyway?” asked Arthur. 

“Glad you asked,” said Eames. “It’s quite a complicated and impressive organ, let me tell you. The left side of my brain is—”

“Why are your projections the way they are?” Arthur interrupted him. 

Eames looked at the mime still miming away and said, “Talented?”

“ _Friendly_ ,” said Arthur, exasperated. “You have the most annoyingly friendly projections I’ve ever seen.” 

“Did you think my subconscious wouldn’t be like the rest of me: gregarious and charming?” 

Arthur built Notre Dame across the plaza from them. A hymn sung by a choir drifted out of it toward them. 

Eames glanced at it and said, “A bit touristy, Arthur. Was that the best you could do for Paris?”

Arthur ignored him, keeping his gaze on the mime as he changed the soundtrack from Notre Dame to a jarring heavy metal beat, completely out-of-place. Any minute now, Eames’s projections would surely start to react to the mess Arthur was making of their dream. But the mime just kept miming. 

“I am now enjoying imagining that you went through a heavy metal phase in your youth,” said Eames, as unperturbed as the mime was. “Please tell me you did. You had a poster of some terrifying, long-haired, leather-clad guitar player over your bed, didn’t you? Or a drummer. Was it a drummer?” 

Arthur deposited the Statue of Liberty in front of his rollicking Notre Dame Cathedral. 

Eames looked at it and said, “What, no accompanying bald eagles?”

And the fucking mime _just kept miming_. 

“That’s not _normal_ ,” Arthur said, jabbing a finger at the mime. 

“No, you’re right, he’s an exceptionally good mime,” Eames agreed. 

“That’s not what I’m talking about. Look at what I just did to your dream. And your projections haven’t even flinched. How do you control them so perfectly? Do you know how valuable that is in dreamsharing?” 

“No, Arthur, please do explain to me the desirable attributes one should possess in the career I’ve excelled in for many years now. That would, indeed, be Arthurian condescension at its finest.” 

Arthur scowled at him. “It’s just _annoying_.” 

“What is?” 

Arthur wished he hadn’t said anything at all. He wished he hadn’t come into this dream. He wished he’d never met Eames on that fateful day in Rio, the tips of his ears red from the sun and sunglasses obscuring his eyes and the breeze off the ocean ruffling at his hair. Eames had flashed that white smile at him and said nothing more thrilling than _hello_ , and Arthur had lost his fucking mind over it for no very good reason. 

“You’re some kind of dreamsharing prodigy,” Arthur pointed out, hearing the huffiness of his tone. 

“I’m just a humble forger, Arthur.” Eames sounded amused. 

“Oh, yes. Right. Absolutely. Who can’t build, even though this dream is one of the most ridiculously detailed dreamscapes I’ve ever seen. Who can get his projections to not only welcome intruders, but to sell them _hats_.”

“Arthur. Darling.” Eames sounded almost gentle, and Arthur sulked at his stupid red balloon and wondered when this dream was going to end and if he could go drown himself in the fountain to get out of it. “It’s because it’s you.” 

Arthur glared at him. “I already told you, the hat was _here_ —”

“No. Arthur. It’s _you_. The projections don’t mind you because you’re _you_. Because I trust you. Put the Statue of Liberty wherever you like, darling. It doesn’t matter. I trust you. My projections aren’t like this for everyone.” 

Arthur looked across at Eames and realized that he had no idea whether or not to believe him. Arthur didn’t let people into his dreams, and Arthur had never been in a dream where he had been trusted so implicitly. He didn’t know what to make of it. It made him feel a little dizzy. 

“And I don’t think you’re stuck-up,” Eames continued, shaking ash off of his cigarette. “And I _especially_ don’t think you’re boring.”

“You give a very good impression otherwise,” Arthur heard himself say, and blamed this dream and his previous dream for why he was behaving like such an incredible idiot. 

“Well, for one thing, I _am_ a professional liar. And, for another thing, shut up. You know perfectly well that I find you and your suits and your notebook and your condescension not boring. They have, on many an occasion, provided the only interesting thing to mock in a hundred-mile radius.” 

It was a nice thing to say, Arthur thought. It was possibly the nicest thing Eames had ever said to him. On their scale of nice things. So when Arthur said, “Fuck you,” he said it without heat and really meant _thanks, that was nice of you to say_.

Eames smiled, which Arthur thought might be Eames’s way of saying _don’t mention it_ , and said, “Now have some more whipped cream, darling, I think it’ll put you in a better mood.” 

Arthur said, “Do you really not smoke topside because you’re worried about lung cancer?”

“Those little surgeon general’s warnings on the side of every pack, they really scare me off.” 

“You’re the only person I know who can worry about getting cancer in a few decades while several international crime syndicates would like nothing better than to know your name and whereabouts.” 

“Thank you, Arthur. I _do_ pride myself on being unique. Although I notice you don’t smoke, either. Not even in a dream.”

“It smells vile,” Arthur pointed out. 

Eames said, “Our time’s almost up.” Then he picked the hat up off his head and threw it like a Frisbee at Arthur’s Statue of Liberty, where he dreamed it into being the perfect size for it and sitting comfortably on its head. 

“Dream a little bigger, Mr. Eames,” Arthur told him, and bedazzled the hat with pink sequins. 

“You can call me ‘darling,’ you know, that’s allowed,” said Eames, making no comment on the pink sequins. 

“Allowed?” echoed Arthur. “As if you know things about rules?” 

“I know that rule. It’s Rule #1: Arthur is allowed to call Eames ‘darling.’” 

“What’s Rule #2?” asked Arthur. 

Eames grinned at him across the café table in a dreamscape of Aix-en-Provence, while a heavy metal band played in Notre Dame Cathedral. “Ah, wouldn’t you like to know?”

And then they woke up.


	11. Chapter 11

Chapter 11

Arthur woke when their breakfast was delivered. He reached for his gun reflexively, sighed when he remembered that he didn’t have a gun, and peeked over the top of the sofa at the tray of croissants. Fucking croissants. He was heartily sick of croissants. 

Arthur dropped back onto the couch and glanced over at Eames, who had fallen asleep on the other couch, mostly, Arthur suspected, because it had saved them a discussion about who ought to sleep in the bed. Arthur hadn’t wanted to get into any sort of possibility of them _sharing_ the bed. But Eames had avoided it by working as late as Arthur, until they had finally both just fallen asleep where they were, Eames with the laptop he’d been researching Sherlock on still resting precariously on his chest. 

Arthur pushed his scattered notes off of himself and sat up and yawned. He should take a shower and get ready for the day. He shouldn’t sit and watch Eames sleep. It was creepy and, anyway, he watched Eames sleep all the time. Granted, normally when he was watching Eames sleep, it was on a job, with a gun in his hand because he thought they might be killed any second. This was a different situation; the threat of death was at least slightly delayed for the moment. 

Eames had mentioned neither dream last night. Just a jovial _And that’s how you dream for fun_ , and that had been the end of it. So Arthur hadn’t had to come up with a further explanation for why he’d woken from his dream so disoriented and out-of-sorts, and they didn’t have to address anything that had happened in Eames’s dream. Arthur wondered if Eames always so easily dismissed everything that happened in dreams. If that was the case, he should have crawled under that café table and challenged Eames’s commitment to that motto. _Nothing counts in a dream, huh?_ he should have said, batting his eyelashes a little and then unzipping Eames’s fly with his teeth. (It had been a dream. He would have been allowed to be coy and smooth and flirtatious in that way he couldn’t be in real life without being incredibly awkward.)

Arthur sighed and told himself firmly to _stop dreaming_ , because this was helping nothing. Instead, he stood and went to ease the laptop out of Eames’s grasp to a safer perch. 

He found himself flat on his back before he knew quite what had happened, and then, reflexively, flipped Eames off of him with a knee to his groin that Eames mostly deflected but still gave Arthur an opening for an elbow to his throat. Which was when Arthur’s reflexes stopped controlling everything and Arthur let go of Eames and rolled away. 

“Jesus Christ,” Eames wheezed. “ _Overkill_ , Arthur.” 

“You started it,” Arthur accused. 

“I knocked you off your feet. You have _wounded_ me,” said Eames pathetically. 

“Oh, you’re fine. You deflected most of it.” Arthur said it breezily, because otherwise he’d feel guilty and apologize profusely, and Eames would take wicked advantage of that, and Arthur would never hear the end of it. So Arthur picked himself up and offered Eames a hand and said, “Surely you are used to finding the least painful way to lose a fight.” 

“Marmalade,” Eames pouted, and gave Arthur a little shove of annoyance, before moving past him toward the promise of coffee in the elevator lobby. 

“I’m taking a shower,” Arthur announced, and then wondered why he felt the need to announce it. 

“I’m drinking a lot of coffee and then I’m filling your notebook with all of the ways I’ve thought of to kill you in the course of our acquaintance,” said Eames sourly. 

Arthur hesitated by the bedroom door, then turned back fully. “You’re not really hurt, right? I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you; you caught me by surprise.” 

“Why is murder always your default reaction to being surprised?” asked Eames. 

“Because I like not dying,” Arthur told him. “And, anyway, you started it, so don’t pretend I’m the only one used to sleeping with a finger on the trigger.” 

Eames allowed the point by swallowing a sip of coffee and saying nothing. His eyes were steady on Arthur, and Arthur couldn’t read them but he didn’t think he could ever read Eames’s eyes accurately. He didn’t think anybody could. It was what made Eames such a good forger: no one ever, ever, _ever_ knew what Eames was thinking. No one ever, ever, ever knew who Eames _was_. No one except Eames. Everyone else just got Eames’s most practiced and targeted seduction scene. 

So Arthur left Eames in the elevator lobby and took a shower. Eames knocked on the bathroom door when Arthur was just finishing up shaving and said loudly, “Do you think you could take me?” 

Arthur regarded his reflection quizzically. “Take you where?”

“In a fight. You think you could take me, don’t you? Do you know how many stone I have on you?”

Arthur began pulling on his suit, still not sure what they were talking about. “We’re fighting with stones?” 

“No, I’m saying I’m _bigger_ than you.” 

Which was obvious to anyone who looked at the two of them. Which was just _fact_. “Okay,” Arthur agreed, bewildered, and picked up the die on the bathroom counter and tossed it twice to make sure it came up four both times. Then he slipped it into his pocket. “You’re bigger than me weight-wise. You’re not taller than me.” 

There was a pause. Arthur pulled on his shirt. Eames said, “Well, you’re not taller than _me_.”

Arthur sighed and finished buttoning his shirt as he opened the door. Eames, leaning against the wall outside it, looked alarmed to suddenly be confronted by Arthur. “We’re the same height, Eames, and it isn’t actually a competition. Now what the hell are you talking about?”

Eames’s eyes were on Arthur’s hands doing up the buttons of his shirt. Arthur was suddenly self-conscious, fumbling as he went to deal with his cuffs, so he gave up and just rolled the sleeves up as if that had been his intention all along. 

“Are you going to let me watch you put your tie on?” asked Eames. “Because I always thought that was like sausages.”

Arthur, slipping the tie around his popped collar, said, “You think my ties are like _sausages_?”

“Not allowed to be seen.”

“It’s not that sausages aren’t _allowed_ to be seen, it’s that they’re unpleasant to be seen being made.” 

“Oh, then I haven’t got that metaphor right at _all_ ,” said Eames, in all seriousness, now watching Arthur’s hands at his tie, so that Arthur could not for the life of him get it to knot correctly. He’d done this almost every single day of his adult life, and now because Eames was watching him he could not remember how to knot his tie. 

Arthur was just about to announce that he’d decided against wearing a tie when Eames batted his hands away and took the tie in his own hands. Arthur had a wild moment of thinking that Eames was going to use the tie to pull him in for a kiss, because it was possible that Arthur had had a couple of fantasies that had gone that way, but instead Eames just commenced to knotting the tie himself. 

“You know how to knot a tie?” Arthur couldn’t help but ask, surprised. 

“You’ve seen me wear ties.”

“But…other people’s ties?”

“I’m a con artist, Arthur,” Eames said calmly. “I know how to knot someone else’s tie and how to lace someone else’s corset and how to mix someone else’s martini and how to pluck someone else’s eyebrows and how to shave someone else’s dog. Not a euphemism. Although euphemistically as well.”

Arthur knew he should have something to say in response to that, but Eames’s proximity was making him dizzy. In his memory, he was pressed against the wall of his childhood bedroom, Eames swooping in for a kiss. Stupid fucking dream, he thought, and closed his eyes. 

“There,” Eames said, and turned down Arthur’s collar, and Arthur forced himself to take a full step back and say something. Anything. 

“Why do you know how to lace a corset?”

Anything but that, he thought, annoyed with his stupid brain. 

“A story for another day,” replied Eames. “Because what I wanted to talk about was this: You think you could take me in a fight.” 

Arthur sighed. “Is this about that?” He waved vaguely toward the suite’s living area. 

“You couldn’t, you know.”

“All right,” Arthur agreed indulgently. “I couldn’t.” He walked out of the bedroom, toward the breakfast in the elevator lobby. 

“You’re just saying that,” Eames accused, following him. 

“Eames. Of course I’m just saying that. Of course I could take you.” 

“Why do you think that?” Eames sounded almost petulant.

Arthur just looked at him as he made his coffee carefully, carefully not thinking of hot chocolate in Aix-en-Provence with Eames flirting with him across the table. 

“I don’t think it’d be as easy for you as all that,” Eames protested. 

“Eames, what does it matter? We’re on the same side. We don’t have to fight each other, so who cares who would win? Unless you’re planning on betraying me, and then we both know I’d hunt you down and carve out your liver, yes?” Arthur was aware of his reputation. He’d never actually done half of the things the dreamsharing community murmured he did, but he’d done enough to give people the fear that he _might_ have done all the rest of it, and that worked well enough for Arthur. 

“I have tricks up my sleeve, you know,” said Eames. “I am not entirely as I seem.”

“God help anyone who takes _you_ at face value.”

“Exactly. So you agree.” 

Arthur sighed, realizing Eames wasn’t going to drop the subject. “In a dream,” he said honestly, “I think you might eventually be able to take me. It’d be a fair fight, but you’re better in a dream than I am, which I’m sure is what you wanted to hear me admit, so I think, if you really pressed that advantage, you’d probably eventually win.” Arthur hoped that would be the end of it. He tore into a croissant and watched Eames mull this over. 

“You think I’m better in a dream than you?” he said finally, quizzically, as if he would have disagreed. 

“You’re more at home in dreams than I am. You’re a natural in a dreamscape. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone so comfortable there.” 

“You don’t seem uncomfortable in a dream.”

“I’m not. But you’re _more_ comfortable. You’re a born improviser, and I am the opposite, and improvisers do better in dreams, ultimately. So, eventually, in a dream you’d probably win.” 

Unfortunately, the flattery did not distract Eames quite enough. “But you think you’d beat me topside.” 

Arthur said, after a moment, “I know I would.” Eames’s improvisation would give him an edge in a dream, but dreams were worlds you could mold to exactly how you wanted them. Eames’s lack of strategic planning would harm him topside, and Arthur excelled at fighting that way. Arthur wasn’t creative enough to _invent_ a way to win, but he was creative enough to _find_ the way to win that already existed, and that was a different kind of creativity. Arthur didn’t think much about going up against Eames—Arthur was well aware he would have probably twisted himself into a pretzel to stay on Eames’s side in any fight—but he had thought about their complementary skill sets, about the fact that, of the two of them, Arthur would let Eames take the lead in a dream if it all went to hell, but he would refuse to relinquish the lead topside. 

“Well, aren’t you smug?” said Eames, sounding vaguely offended. 

Only Eames would want Arthur to flatter him _all_ the time. “Eames, it’s possible that you’ve forgotten that my job description is to _know everything_. Smugness is one of the first traits I have listed on my resume.” 

“You have a fucking _resume_?” said Eames in disbelief. 

“Oh my God, it was a _joke_ ,” said Arthur. 

Eames didn’t look like he was in a joking mood. “Shaving cream,” he said. 

Arthur looked over at him thoughtfully. “You make me question my reality more than any other person I’ve ever met. Seriously, I’ve been checking my totem all morning. Why can’t you just make _sense_?”

“We’re going to shoot each other with shaving cream.” Eames disappeared into the bedroom. 

“ _Why_?” Arthur called after him in exasperation and reached for another croissant. 

“Because I bloody hate it when you’re so bloody smug,” Eames complained, reappearing and tossing Arthur his own shaving cream. 

Arthur caught it instinctively, dropping his croissant to do so, and then turned it toward Eames to shoot him with it and be done. Except that Eames had already disappeared into the bedroom. Eames was apparently taking this whole thing very seriously. 

Arthur sighed and dove behind the couch just as Eames took his first shot at him. 

***

Sherlock quickly realized that he couldn’t actually do much in the abstract. He devoured everything there was to know about dream chemistry and studied the chemical composition of Somnacin and combined it with a number of different substances that he thought might dilute some of its effects while maintaining others that they would need, but without someone to test it on it was impossible to determine if it was working. In fact, without any clear familiarity with how Somnacin worked before fussing with it, Sherlock felt as if he were just taking stabs in the dark. His scientific method was falling to pieces, which he did not approve of. It was no way to plan a massive attack on Moriarty. 

He said as much to John, when John _finally_ decided to stop wasting his time sleeping. 

“I hope that isn’t your way of suggesting that I allow you to test it on me,” said John, still looking bleary-eyed, as he leaned against the counter and waited for the kettle to boil. 

“Well, if I don’t test it on you, who can I test it on?” Surely John could see the difficult position he was putting Sherlock in. “I’m not sure Mrs. Hudson would be—”

“Not Mrs. Hudson,” John said. “You’re not testing it on anyone. I’m still not entirely sure that thing isn’t fatal.”

Sherlock waved a hand at him. “Arthur and Eames use it all the time.”

“That doesn’t actually make me feel better,” said John, as the kettle clicked. 

Sherlock tapped a finger on the table and frowned at his microscope. John made him tea and put it in front of him, but Sherlock didn’t acknowledge it. He was irritated by the difficulty of not being able to test the chemical on John. But John had been upset about Baskerville, and Sherlock felt that Baskerville had been a narrow escape for him on the drugging-John-without-his-permission front, so Sherlock wasn’t inclined to test that ultimatum just yet. John wasn’t happy about anything that was going on, so Sherlock thought he was testing John quite enough just by having the Somnacin in the flat in the first place. 

Which meant there was nothing for it, he decided, and with a heavy sigh picked up his phone and texted Mycroft. _Must test the chemical. Find me a test subject. –SH_

Mycroft, predictably, rang him back. 

Sherlock sighed heavily again and considered not answering but he really needed a test subject. Actually, he really needed a lot of dreamsharing-related things. 

So he answered, glaring at John as he did it because John was driving him to this. John was doing something inexplicable at the sink. Probably washing dishes. John was obsessed with washing dishes. “Who can I use?” Sherlock snapped into the phone. 

“We’ll use Arthur or Eames, of course,” Mycroft responded, unperturbed by the abrupt greeting, because he was _Mycroft_ and _annoying_. “Shall we pay them a visit?” 

John insisted on coming along, which meant they had to wait whilst John got ready. Sherlock spent the time complaining about how _boring_ everything John was doing was. 

“You can go down and wait in the car your brother sent,” John remarked.

The black car had been idling in front of Baker Street since almost immediately after Sherlock had ended the call with Mycroft. Sherlock had been ignoring it because the only thing worse than having to wait for John would have been waiting for John in one of Mycroft’s cars. So Sherlock ignored John’s suggestion and kept complaining. 

Mycroft turned out to be in the car, making notes in a file. 

“Pretending to be important?” Sherlock sneered at him. 

“You should have come up to the flat,” John said, because John periodically said idiotic things like that. 

“I had work to do.” Mycroft flickered a glance at Sherlock. “Did you bring the chemicals for your test?” 

Sherlock glowered at him, refusing to otherwise acknowledge such a stupid question. 

They eventually pulled up in front of a generically posh London hotel. 

John said, “Really? I thought you’d be keeping them in some kind of secret prison.” 

“Don’t be so dramatic, John,” Mycroft told him dismissively. 

“You could at least spring for the full English,” commented Sherlock as they got in the lift. “They’re both not overly fond of croissants.” 

“They just spent a ridiculous amount of money on two bottles of Nebbiolo,” Mycroft responded drily. “They’re lucky they’re getting croissants.” 

“Are the criminals costing you a lot of money, Mycroft?” remarked John. “Fancy that!”

Mycroft gave John a look, and Sherlock’s lips twitched because one of his favorite John traits was how John annoyed Mycroft. It was #11 on Sherlock’s List of Reasons to Kiss John Watson. 

Then the lift doors opened and the first thing they saw was Eames, sprawled on his stomach, in the process of crawling behind the sofa. He looked at them in surprise, and then half-sat up, saying, “Oh. Hi. We—”

Which was when Arthur suddenly launched himself from the dining area of the suite, spraying what was obviously shaving cream directly in Eames’s face before darting away. 

Mycroft sighed heavily, as if he’d been expecting something like this. John just blinked. Sherlock watched because someone had to _observe_ these things. 

Eames swore and swiped at his face and growled, “Bastard. Clearly there was a timeout in effect.” 

“I thought you didn’t believe in timeouts in your sport of choice,” said Arthur pleasantly, and then turned to the knot of them. “Sorry,” he said, fixing his tie. “I was just proving a point.” 

“We weren’t playing bloody _football_ rules, Arthur,” complained Eames. “You’re so fucking _competitive_. And you got it in my _eye_.” 

Arthur said, “I didn’t get it in your eye.” And then, “Don’t rub it in, you’ll make it worse.” And then, “I’m sure you’re fine.” And then, predictably, “Let me see it.”

Sherlock saw it coming from a mile away. Arthur would have if it had been any person other than Eames, but Eames was obviously Arthur’s weakness—even Mycroft had been clever enough to exploit that—so Arthur did what foolish people did and allowed himself to be concerned, just as Eames had expected him to do, because Eames had clearly grown used to being Arthur’s weakness, even if he didn’t seem to see it exactly that way. Eames used such a ploy with Arthur as if Arthur were the sort of person who would fall for such a ploy, not as if Arthur were the sort of person who would only fall for such a ploy coming from Eames. 

So Arthur leaned forward toward Eames, and Eames shot shaving cream into his face.

John said, “What the hell?” in alarm, taking a step back. 

Mycroft said, “We don’t have time for this. Stop it.” 

Arthur said, sputtering at the shaving cream now covering his face, “You fucking— _marmalade_.” 

Eames said, “That’s not how that code word works.” 

Sherlock said, “I’ve got your compound for you.” 

Arthur and Eames looked up at him, and Sherlock smiled. 

***

The suite had blasts of shaving cream all over it. Arthur wiped some up off of one of the dining room chairs and said apologetically, “Eames has terrible aim.” 

“With _shaving cream_. I have good aim with deadly things.” Eames said it sulkily, as if his reputation was being harmed. 

John watched them and wondered if it was his lot in life to be surrounded by grown men who behaved like toddlers. 

“In a dream you do,” said Arthur, pulling a chair over to the living area to make sure there was enough room for them all to sit. “Less so topside. As was the point of this entire exercise.” 

“Marmalade,” said Eames. “And that’s how that code word works.” 

“I really do expect a little more professionalism,” said Mycroft testily, eyeing Arthur with some distaste. 

“I tend to reserve my professionalism for jobs in which I haven’t been kidnapped,” replied Arthur, sitting in the chair he’d just dragged over. 

“Arthur, love, we haven’t been kidnapped, we’ve been lured into government service.” Eames, still sounding sulky, only now over being kidnapped (which John allowed was probably justifiable), collapsed onto one of the couches.

“Ah, yes, how could I forget? The line between government service and crime is so very…”

“Flexible?” Eames finished for him. 

“Open to interpretation.” 

“Arthur prefers specificity,” Eames told Mycroft. 

Mycroft frowned at all of them, and John contemplated how badly Mycroft must want what was in Moriarty’s head to put up with any of this. And how uniquely good at their jobs Arthur and Eames must be. 

“Anyways, darling, time to be professional.” Eames clapped his hands together in some imitation of enthusiasm. 

Arthur was already pulling out his notebook and readying his pen. “Tell us about the compound you’ve created, Sherlock.” 

Sherlock sat on the back of the living area’s armchair. John, with little choice otherwise, sat next to Mycroft on the other couch, while Sherlock rattled off a long list of chemical compounds. 

Arthur copied all of them out, glanced over it, and then nodded sharply. “Yes.” He looked at Eames. “You should be fine, too.”

Eames peered over his shoulder and nodded. “Yes. That’s fine.” 

“Good.” Arthur closed his notebook and stood. “Did you bring it then? Might as well test it.” 

“I’d like to test it, too,” Sherlock announced. 

Because of course he would. John wished he’d thought to bring along a flask, so he could play a drinking game of taking a shot every time Sherlock tried to wheedle his way into a dream. Except that John was worried he wouldn’t have to drink for very long before Sherlock got his way. Because that was how Sherlock was. 

“Sherlock—” Mycroft began. 

“No.” Arthur answered immediately, and John decided that maybe he liked Arthur. 

Sherlock pouted. “Why not?”

“It’s too dangerous.”

“But _you’re_ going to use it.” 

“Because I use a lot of drugs and I know my toxicology reports by heart, and I shouldn’t have some kind of deadly allergic reaction to the combination of drugs you put together. Can you say the same?” 

Sherlock glared at him. “I’m not an _idiot_. I know what’s going to kill me and what’s not.”

“You’re not using it. Not even Eames is using it. I’m using it because this is my job, and if I don’t die, maybe you’ll get to use it eventually someday.”

“Arthur, do have a care, you’re making dreamsharing sound like such whimsical fun,” said Eames. 

Arthur waggled his finger at Sherlock. 

Sherlock regarded him, then said, “If it doesn’t kill you, you’ll let me use it.” 

“Sherlock, you’re not—” began Mycroft. 

Except that Arthur said, “Yes, fine. After you get bloodwork done to make sure you’re not allergic to any of the stuff you put in this.”

“I’m not—” Sherlock began furiously. 

“Don’t argue with him,” said Eames, “he’s the stubbornest person I’ve ever met.”

“Not actually a word,” Arthur told him. 

“Marmalade, darling,” said Eames. 

“I don’t want Sherlock doing any—” Mycroft began again, furiously. 

“He’s going to need to know a lot more about dreamsharing if he’s going to help us,” Arthur pointed out reasonably, accepting the test tube Sherlock smugly handed across. 

“He was never supposed to be helping you,” Mycroft bit out. 

Arthur was busying himself with a silver briefcase, setting things up, expertly slipping a needle into his own vein. “You commandeered me to run point on this job, so sit back and let me run point. I’m doing two minutes. It should be enough time.” Arthur glanced at Eames, who nodded, and then Arthur settled on the couch next to him and looked at him. “You ready?” 

“Arthur, if this compound Sherlock’s created kills you and this is the last thing we ever get to say to each other, can I inherit your cufflink collection?” 

Arthur leaned forward and pressed a button on the PASIV. 

“Also, I _am_ a better fencer than you, topside or dreamscape,” Eames blurted out quickly. 

“Going to sleep now, Mr. Eames,” murmured Arthur, and then he was.


	12. Chapter 12

Chapter 12

Arthur was in the hotel suite. In the bedroom instead of the main living area. It looked exactly the way it was supposed to look, but it wasn’t where he’d intended to go. He’d intended to go to the prison he was working on. He frowned. Ending up in entirely the wrong dream was not a good sign. 

There was the murmur of voices from the living area, and he followed them, only when he walked out the living area was empty. He stood and listened hard, but although he could still hear the voices, he couldn’t get them to coalesce into words. What was clear to him, though, was that he was hearing the talking from real life, that the dream was thin enough that a lot was breaking through. 

Arthur tried to dream himself a mug of hot chocolate on the table but got nowhere. He tried to remember the last time he’d tried to dream something up and couldn’t. He tried to dream himself a gun so he could shoot himself and get out of the dream and couldn’t even do that. 

Arthur sighed and sat on the couch and listened to the hum of conversation he couldn’t take part in. He glanced at his watch to see how much time he’d have to sit here, bored, before the dream would end. 

And then, far ahead of when he thought he should have, he woke up. 

***

Eames monitored Arthur’s heart rate and blood pressure and thought how two minutes was nothing and Arthur was right that the compound should give them no trouble. But that was no guarantee, and Eames thought he’d feel much better once Arthur woke up. 

“So what will he do?” asked Sherlock, sounding insatiably curious. 

Eames didn’t want to talk to Sherlock. Eames wanted to worry about Arthur. But he supposed the conversation would help the two minutes go by faster. “He’ll try out the dream, see if he thinks it’ll work for us.”

“And then what?”

Eames almost smiled. “And then he’ll try it again and again and again because he’s Arthur and he’s good at his job.” 

“And that’s his job? Trying out the dream?”

“Yes. Trying out everything, really. Like this compound here.” 

“Sounds dangerous,” commented John.

“Considering your blog and the fact that you walked in here with a gun that I suspect is illegal tucked into the waistband of your trousers, I find that an interesting assessment,” remarked Eames wryly. 

“Do you read his blog?” demanded Sherlock, sounding appalled. 

“Do you really not know that the Earth goes around the sun?” asked Eames. 

Sherlock rolled his eyes. “Everybody gets caught up on that. It’s _pointless_. What about _my_ blog?” 

“Arthur read it,” said Eames, having far too much fun with this conversation. “I fell asleep.” 

Sherlock looked so affronted that it took him a few moments to gather himself enough to speak. 

But Eames never got to hear what Sherlock was going to say, because Arthur woke up. 

“Welcome back,” Eames told him, relieved to have it over. “Not a single glitch up here.” 

“It’s not going to work,” said Arthur, pulling the needle out of his arm. 

“Why not?” 

“It’s too shallow.” 

“You said you wanted a shallow dream,” Sherlock pointed out defensively. 

“It was _too_ shallow. I never fully got into the dream state. I couldn’t even dream myself a gun to get out of there early. Which is another thing: the time is off. My time in the dream was shorter than I expected it to be. But I suspect it’s always going to be the case with what we’re trying to do, that’s something we’ll just have to watch out for.” 

“You said you didn’t want Moriarty’s subconscious to be able to catch hold.” 

“I don’t. But it needs to be enough of a dream that Eames and I can do our thing.” 

“Especially as I’m rubbish at things topside,” added Eames, to make sure that Arthur didn’t think he’d forgotten that. 

Arthur just gave him that patronizing, long-suffering look that Eames adored. 

So Eames decided to pile it on and said, “Maybe I should give it a try. Seeing as how I’m better down below than you are.” And Eames waggled his eyebrows, just to put as much innuendo into that phrase as he possibly could, just to see Arthur’s glorious scowl at him. Someday, Eames thought, he might be able to make Arthur smile with as little effort as he made him scowl, and then he would collect his smiles, but for the time being the scowls were good enough. 

Arthur said, “Not without fresh bloodwork from you.” 

“In case I’ve developed a deadly allergy since the last time you made me do the bloodwork?”

“Exactly that, Mr. Eames,” said Arthur firmly. 

Sherlock said, “Teach me how to use the Somnacin.” 

“Sherlock—” said Mycroft. 

“I need to know how to use it to fix the issues, and it’s perfectly safe,” Sherlock cut through him, and turned to Arthur. “Isn’t it safe?”

Eames had never seen anybody have a bad reaction to Somnacin.

Arthur had apparently had the same experience, because he said, “It’s perfectly safe.”

“If it was perfectly safe,” retorted John, “it wouldn’t be a crime to use it.” 

“Because governments only create laws that make sense?” said Arthur. “And anyway,” he indicated Mycroft, “governments use it.” 

Mycroft glared at him.

“I need to go into a dream,” Sherlock demanded. “If I’m going to get right the balance that we need, I need to understand what happens in a dream.” 

Eames allowed that he had a point. Eames had never heard of a chemist going in as blind as Sherlock was being forced to. 

Next to him, Arthur looked at him, hesitating. 

Eames wasn’t sure why. He tipped his head and said, “You train people in your dreams all the time.” The rumor was that more dreamsharers had been trained in Arthur’s dreams than any other person. He was renowned for his calm, stable dreams, for how steadily he could hold the world together. 

“Right,” Arthur said slowly. “Right. Yes. Of course.” He looked back at Sherlock. 

Eames continued to be confused. He wished for probably the millionth time in his life that he could just read Arthur’s mind. Why were Arthur’s thoughts so continuously opaque to him? Was this about whatever dream he’d had yesterday that had clearly unsettled him so much? Eames said, “We could take him into one of my dreams, I guess, but I’m not really set up for training, and this is what you _do_.” He’d never known Arthur to shirk his own job before. 

“No, I know,” said Arthur, although he sounded like he was saying the opposite. “Yes. Absolutely.” He stood. “Ground rules.” 

“What?” said Eames, wondering why he was standing. 

Arthur just said to Sherlock, “Ground rules. Come with me,” and marched into the bedroom. 

Sherlock followed him, and Eames blinked after them. 

John said to Mycroft, “This is all a terrible idea. He’s going to end up in Moriarty’s head, and I don’t know what makes you think he’ll be lucky enough to escape destruction a second time.” 

Eames pushed aside the weirdness of Arthur dragging Sherlock away and turned to Mycroft and John. Time, he thought, to do a bit of his job while Arthur was theoretically doing his own. “Good choice of conversational topic,” said Eames. “Tell me everything there is to know about Sherlock’s relationship with Moriarty.” 

***

Arthur closed the bedroom door, walked into the bathroom, waited for Sherlock to follow, and closed that as well. Sherlock just watched him calmly. He had unsettling eyes, Arthur couldn’t get a read on their color, and they were just so _knowing_ , as if Sherlock already knew everything Arthur was planning to say. He wished suddenly to go into Sherlock’s head, just so he could make Sherlock feel as splayed open. 

Arthur said, “The thing about dreams is that you don’t ever have complete control over what’s going on in them. Some of us are better at it than others, and I am very good at it, but you looked at me and in the space of five heartbeats knew more about me than anyone on the planet, so if I’m going to let you in my head, we’re setting ground rules. _A_ ground rule. One.” Arthur met Sherlock’s eyes and said it firmly. “You don’t tell Eames.”

Sherlock was silent for a moment, studying him very closely, perusing him like the pages of a gossip magazine. Arthur thought how inconvenient real life was, that you couldn’t just shoot yourself and wake up out of an uncomfortable situation. “Why not?” Sherlock asked, finally. 

“Because he doesn’t know.”

“Obviously. And you don’t want him to know. Also obvious. Why not?”

“Because he—I—wait a second. I don’t have to tell _you_ why _anything_ ,” Arthur realized, wondering why he was acting like such a fool. “I’m going to teach you dreamsharing, which you obviously want to know about very badly, and I’m going to do it despite the fact that your brother, who’s holding me hostage, doesn’t want me to. In return, you’re going to keep your mouth shut about whatever it is about me that told you I’m in love with Eames. I’m going to take you into my dream, and I’m going to show you how it works, and you’re not going to say a single word about anything in my subconscious meaning anything about Eames. Do we have a deal?”

Sherlock studied him, his gaze flickering all over him, and then he said, “Yes. You’re a fascinating criminal.” 

“Thank you,” said Arthur, turning to the bathroom door.

“And also an idiot,” continued Sherlock. 

“I’m sure you think that of everyone,” remarked Arthur drily, his hand on the bathroom doorknob but inexplicably not opening it yet. 

“The terms of endearment,” Sherlock said. 

“The what?” said Arthur, not following. 

“He calls you ‘darling’ and ‘love’ and other ridiculous things, almost constantly.”

Oh. _Eames’s_ terms of endearment. “Yes,” Arthur said. “Because he’s British and a flirt and annoying.” 

Sherlock shook his head and sighed. “You see but you do not observe.” 

Arthur bristled because he didn’t require the amount of ego-stroking that Eames did but he still didn’t like to be so calmly insulted, especially not about something so personally cherished as Eames’s nicknames for him. “What does that mean?” he demanded. 

“He says them because he’s British and a flirt and annoying. So who else does he say them to?” asked Sherlock evenly, and then opened the bathroom door and walked through it as if Arthur was not frozen into place. 

Because he’d never heard Eames use a single term of endearment with any other person. 

***

John knew two things: One, Sherlock Holmes made stupid decisions. Two, it was John’s job to save him from those stupid decisions. He’d done it on their very first day of cohabitation, killing a man just because Sherlock had been stupid enough to go and get himself in danger. He wasn’t going to stop anytime soon. And he wasn’t going to stop here. 

So when Arthur and Sherlock rejoined the living area with the rest of them, John said, “I’m going in too.” 

Sherlock gave him an irritated look. “I thought you didn’t _approve_ of dreamsharing.” 

“I don’t. But I need to make sure you don’t get into trouble.” 

“He isn’t going to get into trouble,” Arthur said, sounding offended, fiddling with the contents of his silver briefcase. “I’ve trained dozens of dreamsharers without incident.” 

“There was that time you accidentally got Cecile trampled by a herd of elephants,” said Eames lazily from where he was sprawled on the couch. He’d been drinking in every bit of John’s rant about Moriarty, and he looked reflective now. 

Arthur gave him a dark look. “That wasn’t my— How do you even know about that?”

“Darling, it was all over dreamsharing. It’s the only Funny Story About Arthur I’ve ever heard told by someone who wasn’t me.” 

“Ignore him,” Arthur said to John. “It wasn’t a herd of elephants, it was a single elephant, and Cecile was an idiot, and nothing happened to her, she just woke up.”

“With a paralyzing fear of elephants,” contributed Eames. 

“It wouldn’t have been paralyzing if she’d taken my advice and _left the circus_ ,” Arthur snapped. 

Eames shrugged. 

John stared between them and decided that that insanity settled it. “Sherlock can also be an idiot.” 

Sherlock gasped his indignation. 

John ignored him. “So I’m going in, too. We can both go in at the same time?” 

“Yes,” Arthur said, jerkily doing things with the silver briefcase, and John wished Eames hadn’t put him in a bad mood. “But I am not running a _tour group_ , okay? It’s a _training session_. I don’t show off bells and whistles. Don’t expect the Great Wall of China with talking parakeets in space.” 

“Arthur only does that on special occasions,” said Eames. 

“As soon as Mycroft gives me back my gun, I’m going to shoot you,” Arthur told him. 

“What makes you think I’m ever giving you back your gun?” Mycroft asked, sounding annoyed. 

John thought Mycroft felt as if he had lost control of this entire operation, and Mycroft hated to be out of control. Half of John wanted to congratulate Arthur and Eames for thwarting Mycroft’s controlling nature so thoroughly, and the other half of him was terrified that Arthur and Eames might actually _need_ to be checked by Mycroft. 

Arthur said, without missing a beat, “As soon as I steal my gun back from Mycroft, I’m going to shoot you.” 

“Oh, petal, stop saying such sweet nothings, you know how they go straight to my head.” 

Arthur turned away from Eames, scowling, and held out needles to John and Sherlock. “Here. Hold out your arms and I’ll—”

“I’m a doctor and he’s a recovering drug addict, I think we can find our own veins,” said John wryly. 

“Recovering drug addict,” repeated Eames musingly, as if he was filing that tidbit of information away, too. 

Sherlock didn’t seem annoyed that John had brought up his drug habit, which normally John did not do. Sherlock was distracted by his obvious glee over getting to go into a dream. John didn’t see what the big deal was. He’d had plenty of dreams and he hadn’t really wanted to live in any of them. John supposed this was how you behaved when you didn’t remember your dreams. 

“Two minutes,” Arthur said to Eames. 

“Two minutes?” protested Sherlock. “That’s hardly enough time.” 

“It’s plenty of time. Time moves differently in a dream. You’ll see.” 

“Two minutes to ourselves, Mycroft,” remarked Eames. “What shall we do to pass the time? Do you play poker?” 

***

John was systematically shredding a cocktail napkin to bits. Sherlock was drumming his fingers on the shiny, lacquered table. 

Arthur was saying, “Pay attention. Both of you. We’re in a dream.” 

John looked from the half-drunk glass of scotch in front of him to Arthur himself, dressed in a three-piece suit in a rich shade of brown, with an even darker brown tie with vivid blue thread shot through it in a pattern that wasn’t quite argyle. 

Sherlock sucked in a breath and looked around them and said, “ _Oh_. So you’re doing all of this?” 

“I’m doing all of this,” Arthur affirmed. 

John looked around them. It was a busy bar, full of the chatter of people. He looked back at Arthur, who had a glass of wine in front of him and looked absolutely impeccable and almost bored. “You don’t look like you’re doing anything.” 

Every single person in the bar with them vanished. “That’s the trick of it, isn’t it?” said Arthur calmly. 

“So what can you do?” Sherlock asked, leaning forward. “What are the limits?”

“It depends on the context of the question. I can do almost anything I want right now, because this is my dream and my subconscious will let me. You? You have limits.” 

“What limits?” 

“You’re not supposed to be here. You’re an intruder. Right now you’re flying under the radar, haven’t done anything to attract notice, but the more you do, the more you change, the more you wrinkle my subconscious, the more I’m going to start to notice you.”

“And that would be a bad thing?” John guessed, from the edge to Arthur’s voice. 

“Here? In my head? Not especially. That’s why I do the training. I have my projections under control. In a mark’s head, it’s a terrible thing. The key to dreamsharing is to get in and get out before the mark’s subconscious fully grasps what you are.” 

“Projections?” John echoed. 

“The people,” Sherlock said, looking off in the distance. 

John followed his gaze. The bar was connected to a lobby, and the lobby was full of people going about their business. 

“How far does it go?” Sherlock asked, already sliding off his chair. “Can we hit the edge of it?”

“Depends on the dreamer and the specific dream. This is my standard training dream, so I’ve got the whole city set up. I’ve set it up as a paradox, so it’s a closed dream. All of the blocks lead back to each other.” 

Sherlock was walking into the lobby. Arthur followed behind him, and John behind the two of them. He didn’t like being in the dream, he decided. There was an otherworldly difference to it that felt, well, like _dreaming_. Like this wasn’t quite happening to him. Even though, in this instance, it _was_. But, at the same time, he wasn’t sure he would have noticed this strange quality if Arthur hadn’t pointed it out to him. It was odd. 

Neither Sherlock nor Arthur looked affected by the oddness. John supposed that Arthur was constantly in and out of dreams for a living. And Sherlock was Sherlock, so it was no surprise to him that he was treating the whole thing as some kind of delightful experiment. 

They walked through the lobby and outside. The sun was shining brightly, and the cars going by were all newer and well-washed, and everyone around them was well-dressed and attractive, young professional types in suits who were all very busy, dashing about with somewhere to go. Something about it made John think that if he’d tried to predict what Arthur’s dream would look like, he would have predicted something exactly like this. 

“Are you controlling the weather?” Sherlock asked, now walking briskly, forcing the crowds of bustling people to part around him. No one really took notice of him. 

“Yes,” said Arthur. “I like sunlight.” 

“So this is a deep dream,” concluded Sherlock. 

“It’s a fairly standard dream. You can get deeper, go down another level, even two, but it’s tricky and not necessary right now.” 

“What about my dream was too shallow?” demanded Sherlock, as they continued to walk. Sherlock was now peering into the faces of the projections walking by, all of whom were starting to notice him. 

“I couldn’t do this,” said Arthur, and just like that was holding a newspaper. 

“But this is your dream,” said John. “Can’t you just… _do_ that?”

“Yes. But you can, too. Anyone can, in a dream. Try it.” 

John had no idea what to even _do_ but Sherlock was suddenly holding a newspaper, too. 

John stared. “But how did you—”

“It’s a _dream_ , John,” Sherlock said, sounding like an enthusiastic little boy. He’d stopped walking now, and tossed the newspaper to the ground, immediately replacing it in his hand with…a walking stick, which he also discarded. A pipe, which he stuck in his mouth. What looked like a cup of coffee, which he handed across to John. “Drink it. Should be tea perfectly made the way you prefer.”

John sipped suspiciously. And it was. The perfect temperature even. 

Sherlock took the pipe out of his mouth and gestured with it. “So this is what you need to be able to do in the shallow dream?”

“Exactly.” Arthur dreamed himself a deerstalker and handed it to Sherlock with a smirk. Sherlock frowned and dreamed it into the black, fuzzy hat of the Queen’s Guard, and then stuck it on his head, satisfied. “We need to have the ability to manipulate the dreamscape to get what we want out of it.”

“While being shallow enough that you don’t want to get pulled down too deeply,” said Sherlock, who had resumed walking. “It’s tricky.” 

“Ah, but you’re very smart, aren’t you?”

“Flattery will get you _everywhere_ ,” John told him. 

Suddenly in front of them was a spiral staircase that led up to a small viewing platform. John blinked at it. Sherlock went up it immediately, taking the lay of the land. 

“You need to be careful,” Arthur called up to Sherlock. 

John would ordinarily have been worried about Sherlock falling off, too, except that he was distracted by the fact that the people passing on the pavement were now starting to jostle him a bit, knocking into him and glaring at him. 

“Sorry,” Arthur said to John. “But it’s one thing to dream up objects, and another thing entirely to start inserting structures. My subconscious doesn’t like it.” 

John looked at the glaring people walking by. “Sherlock created that viewing platform?”

“Yes. Why would I put a viewing platform in the middle of a sidewalk?” 

“I don’t know, it’s a _dream_.” 

Arthur shook his head. “It isn’t the way I dream, and I know it, so I’m growing disgruntled.”

“What happens if Sherlock keeps building?”

“In my dream? Not much. My projections will get progressively more annoyed, progressively frownier. But they won’t _attack_. Not unless Sherlock does something really outrageous that I can’t brace for.”

John almost snorted. “Well, he’s known for that. So does that mean they’d attack in other people’s dreams?”

“Yes. And, depending on the person, they can be fucking vicious,” said Arthur, with feeling. 

“What happens if they attack you?” asked John. 

“You die,” answered Arthur nonchalantly. “And then you wake up.”


	13. Chapter 13

Chapter 13

Eames hated to be the one left behind. Partly that was because he almost never did it. If a forger was involved in an extraction it was because he was needed down below, and so he never sat around topside, no matter how many levels of dream they were working on, watching over dreamers. He did it sometimes, occasionally, during tricky trainings in unfriendly places, and that was when he had worked out that he rather hated it. It was all passivity, and Eames liked to be _doing_. He thought it amazing that Arthur handled it so well, so calmly, but he supposed that was part of who Arthur was: Arthur did everything well and calmly. It was bloody annoying when it wasn’t bloody sexy as fuck. 

Eames looked across at Mycroft, who was studying the tip of his umbrella and said, “Seriously. Poker?”

“You cannot play a game of poker in two minutes, Mr. Eames,” said Mycroft. 

“I can,” grinned Eames. 

“Because you either cheat spectacularly or lose spectacularly,” sighed Mycroft, and stopped studying the tip of his umbrella to frown thunderously over at Eames. “The two of you are playing quite a dangerous game here. Granted, it appears to mostly be Arthur’s game, but as I suspect you are the one who would be most effective at talking Arthur out of it, I’m speaking to you about it.” 

Eames casually leaned back on the couch, casually put his ankle on his knee, casually checked the vitals of his dreamers, and casually wished for a gun to aim at Mycroft’s bloody, sodding, obnoxious head. “What game?” he asked innocently. 

“I didn’t want my brother involved.” 

“Talk to Moriarty about that. Arthur and I would have happily never met any of you,” Eames reminded him. 

“And for the amount of money you seem to be expecting to be paid, I’d expect you to take this job seriously.” 

“You don’t think we’re taking this job seriously?” Eames looked pointedly at Arthur’s accumulated piles of organized research all over the suite. 

“Arthur can do this in his sleep, as we both know. I’m not paying for him to do it whilst being distracted by very expensive bottles of wine and seduction scenes in museums and _shaving cream contests_.” 

“I’m not seducing Arthur,” Eames said, and when Mycroft lifted an eyebrow at him, Eames mentally allowed the fact that he was _always_ , on some level, trying to seduce Arthur. It was reflexive with him. So instead he thought, _Well, no more than usual_ , and went for his better argument. “Arthur’s not distracted. We are neither of us distracted. Do you think we don’t want to just finish this damn job and get out of here as quickly as possible? Without losing our minds? Because I think we have a pretty bloody good incentive to do that. This may surprise you, but we’re both rather alarmingly fond of our minds.” 

“You’ve been ignoring my directives—”

“Because you don’t know what you’re doing,” Eames snapped. “ _Arthur_ knows what he’s doing. Arthur has never once let me down. In fact, usually he saves my life in some spectacular way I’d never have predicted, because he’s bloody _Arthur_ and he knows fucking everything in this really terrifying way. You, on the other hand, have done nothing but hit me with a car, blackmail me into doing a job that’s possibly going to destroy me, and hold me prisoner in a hotel suite. You really think I’m not going to let Arthur ignore all of your directives that he wants? I want to get out of this alive, and he’s the one who makes that happen. And if you want what’s in Moriarty’s head, you’ll stop being so difficult and full of yourself and just let Arthur do what he says we need to do. If you didn’t want that, I have no sodding clue why you made me call him.” 

Mycroft looked at him for a long moment. Then he bit out, “You can leave this suite whenever you want, as you proved yesterday.” 

“Ah, but can we leave London?” asked Eames knowingly. 

Mycroft gazed at him stonily. 

“Stop fighting with us,” Eames said, shifting his position on the couch. He was tense from pretending to be relaxed, all of his muscles cramped from the trapped impulse of going for a weapon he didn’t have, of just going for Mycroft’s throat in the alternative. His movement caused Arthur next to him to tip against him, head on his shoulder. Eames tried to nudge him upward, but Arthur fell back against him, and Eames sighed and checked his watch to see whether it was even worth it to manhandle Arthur back onto his own side of the couch. 

Mycroft said, “Where do you wish your payment directed, in the event of your incapacitation?” 

Eames had no bloody idea. The only person he really wanted to take care of in the world was Arthur. Which Eames knew was ironic, because Arthur was basically the person least likely to ever let anybody take care of him. And then he realized: _Arthur’s family_. Eames looked across at Mycroft and said, “Arthur has a family. Parents and a sister and a niece and a nephew.” 

“Yes. I know. That’s where his share of the payment is going.” 

Eames blinked. “How do you know that?”

Mycroft looked long-suffering. “He _emailed_ it to me.” 

Eames’s lips twitched. “Aw, did you give him your email address? How sweet.” 

Mycroft glared at him. 

Eames thought Arthur was the most fucking adorable person he’d ever met, tracking down Mycroft’s presumably top-secret email address just to be as annoying as possible. Eames said, not even bothering to pretend he wasn’t smiling with glee, “Send mine to wherever you’re sending Arthur’s.” 

“You should know that Arthur specified that, in the event he is incapacitated and you are not, it should go to you.” 

Eames narrowed his eyes and glanced at Arthur, breathing steadily against his shoulder like some mockery of a post-coital embrace. He said, “That’s because Arthur’s an idiot. But you can give my half to him if the opposite should come to pass.” 

Mycroft nodded, and Arthur woke. He lifted a wry eyebrow at Eames upon finding himself nestled against him, and Eames said, “I jostled you.” 

“That was _fantastic_ ,” Sherlock said, already taking his cannula out so that he could basically bounce around the hotel suite. “That was _Christmas_.” 

“He’s a natural,” Arthur told Eames, taking his own cannula out. 

“Of course he is.” 

“My projections _hated_ him.”

Eames bit down on his laugh. “Of course they did.”

“Shut up,” Arthur told him, re-packing the PASIV, but there was a hint of dimples there as he did it. 

“So what have we learned?” Eames asked, leaning back on the couch and transferring his gaze from Sherlock to John, who looked considerably less enthusiastic. Eames tipped his head at him. “You didn’t like it,” he realized. Not everyone did, of course. 

“I don’t like anything about this,” John replied firmly. “But I can see why going into Moriarty like that would drive someone insane.” 

“It’s going to be such a delicate, tricky balance to find,” Sherlock was saying enthusiastically, still roving all over the suite. “I see what you mean now about how it needs to be shallow but _not_. If you were trapped in Moriarty’s subconscious and you could do nothing, even if it wasn’t deep in his subconscious, it would be terrible. His projections wouldn’t be polite businesspeople.”

“What would they be?” Eames asked. 

“Madmen,” answered Sherlock succinctly. 

***

Eames was shaving. He always did a terrible, slapdash job of shaving because a few hours later he could use another shave. He did, for one brief period of time, decide to give up shaving altogether. He had despised the ensuing beard, which had been itchy and hot and constantly, somehow, in the way. So instead he went back to haphazard shaving. 

“So you know the next step, right?” said Arthur from the bedroom. 

Eames glanced out of the bathroom door he’d cracked open. Arthur had been in the living area when he’d gone in to take a shower, but now Arthur was lying on his back in the middle of the bed, throwing something up in the air and catching it. Eames decided he’d done well enough, swiped a towel over his face, and walked out into the bedroom, saying, “Clarify for me, pet. I was too busy shaving to read your thoughts.”

Arthur looked at him, caught whatever it was he was throwing, and lifted his eyebrows. “Doing a terrible job of shaving.” 

“It’s dashing,” said Eames. 

“It’s _messy_.” 

“It’s very _thoughtfully_ messy,” countered Eames. 

Arthur sighed and held up what was in his hands. Eames recognized it now as a pair of his socks. The pair with sombreros on them that he’d bought himself in Mexico City a few jobs ago. “Are you serious with these socks?” 

Eames leaned over and tugged up the nearest leg of Arthur’s trousers, revealing socks that were striped with seven different shades of pink, and just gave Arthur a look. 

“These socks match my tie,” Arthur said, gesturing to the tie he was wearing, which _did_ have pink in the design. 

Of course Arthur would match his socks to his tie. “And I bet you paid four hundred dollars for those socks.”

“Nobody pays four hundred dollars for a pair of socks,” Arthur told him, as if he was an idiot.

“Ah, but you’re not nobody, darling.” 

Arthur threw the sombrero socks at Eames’s head. Eames caught them easily. Arthur said, “How much did you pay for those things? Because if you paid five cents, you overpaid.” 

“I stole them,” Eames lied primly. 

And Arthur laughed. Arthur _laughed_. Arthur sprawled on his back on a bed in half of a suit and he _laughed_ , and Eames’s mouth went dry and his hands clenched convulsively in the stupid sombrero socks he was holding. He thought to himself, _Crawl onto that bed with him and kiss that laughter out of him_ , and then he thought, _No, don’t do that, terrible idea_ , and then he thought, _Best idea you’ve ever had, do it._

He stood in paroxysms of indecision. Because the thing was it was what he wanted more than anything else in the universe, and that was what was terrifying to him. He wanted to fuck Arthur, yes. He wanted to have absolutely filthy sex with him that would leave them both as quivering messes unable to walk for days afterward. That would be lovely, of course it would be. But he really wanted—what he really, really, _really_ wanted, when he thought about Arthur, when he let himself _dream_ about Arthur—was just this, entirely this. He didn’t want Arthur naked and writhing and gasping; he wanted Arthur to smile at him, bright and affectionate, dimples on unselfconscious full display, and he wanted to drop down into a kiss with him and have Arthur close his hands into his hair and kiss him back and that was _pathetic_ , the whole thing was _pathetic_. Eames had never fully understood how it was that _Arthur_ , of all people, had somehow reduced him to that, and there were times when Eames hated Arthur for how futilely he longed for him, craved his presence, stood in dank alleyways in dreams and reality when jobs had gone pear-shaped, not missing the cigarettes he’d given up years ago but the sound of Arthur’s voice, the flash of Arthur’s eyes at him. 

And it was why he’d never tried to pull Arthur with any seriousness. If Eames had wanted to get Arthur in bed, he would have had Arthur in bed by now. He entertained no illusions that he couldn’t have coaxed Arthur into a casual shag. It was all the rest of it that terrified him. He didn’t want a casual shag from Arthur, and Eames spent half of his time worrying that Arthur would never want more than that and the other half of his time worrying that Arthur _would_. 

Arthur said, dimples in evidence, “All of the things you could steal, and you steal _sombrero socks_. I think your reputation as a thief is overstated.” 

Eames felt as if he’d missed his moment to make his move, as if Arthur had made the decision for him. He tossed the sombrero socks over toward his suitcase and said lightly, “You won’t think that when I present you with your Titian.” 

“How’s that coming, anyway?” Arthur sounded warm, content, teasing. 

Eames dropped onto the bed next to him because he couldn’t resist. He stayed on his back, staring at the ceiling, not touching him, enjoying the novelty of being in the same bed as Arthur, which he had never yet accomplished, for all the time they spent literally sleeping in each other’s presence. He said, “Less successful so far than your email-stalking of our kidnapper.” 

“Oh, did he mention that?” 

Even without looking at him, Eames could envision perfectly the smug look Arthur would be wearing. “He did. And you’re a show-off.” 

“No, I’m not.” 

“You are. Otherwise, what’s this all about?” Eames nudged his bare foot against Arthur’s pink-striped socks. 

“Do you have some kind of sock fetish?” said Arthur. 

Eames propped himself up on his elbow, drew his toes along Arthur’s socked ankle, and wondered how such a simple thing could abruptly become so erotic. “Now that you mention it,” he said, although he had never previously given any thought to socks whatsoever. 

“Stop it,” said Arthur good-naturedly, shifting his leg away from Eames’s foot. He tilted a bit to look up at him, and he didn’t seem upset, just not interested. “The next step,” he said. “That’s what I was going to talk to you about.” 

“And I was hoping I could distract you from your default position of Irritatingly Bossy.” 

“No such luck,” rejoined Arthur, unperturbed. “We need to get into the heads of the people Moriarty’s driven insane.” 

“They’re in limbo,” Eames reminded him. 

“They’re in limbo because Mycroft’s keeping them in limbo. We’ll have him kick them out, and then we’ll pay them a visit. We just need to know what we’re up against, and the only way I can think of to get a more accurate picture of that is to work backward: start with the effect, and see if we can determine the cause.”

“Yes. You’re right.” Eames flopped back down on his back next to Arthur. “I’m not looking forward to that. Have you ever been inside an insane person’s dream before?” 

“No. Is it horrifying?” 

“It’s sad,” said Eames. 

There was a moment of silence. 

Arthur said, “In the meantime, Sherlock will keep working on the compound, I’ll keep working on the prison architecture, and you’ll keep working on your forgery.” 

“Do you think we need an extractor?” asked Eames, around a yawn. It was temptingly warm and relaxing there in the bed next to Arthur. 

“No, we can handle it. The trick is really going to be the compound and the forgery.”

“So your plan is still to use a forgery? I thought you said Sherlock was a natural.”

“He is, but I don’t want him involved in the Moriarty dream. John clearly doesn’t trust him around Moriarty. Neither does Mycroft. I don’t think we should.” 

“I made John tell me about Sherlock and Moriarty, while you were discussing your ground rules with Sherlock. Which, what the hell was that all about?” 

“Sherlock looks at you and knows everything about you. It must be even worse in your subconscious. I wanted to foreclose that.” 

“Arthur, don’t tease me with references to something deep and dark and intriguing in your past.” 

“I’ve done many deep, dark, and intriguing things in my past, many of them _with you_ , so come off it. What did John tell you about Sherlock and Moriarty?”

“Let’s just say I agree with you that Sherlock should be kept far away from that dream,” said Eames, and then fell silent, contemplating what in Arthur’s subconscious he might be worried about exposing. 

Arthur said, into the silence, “What’s the deal with the fencing?” 

Eames allowed himself to be distracted from thinking about Arthur’s subconscious. “Ah, now you’re jealous, aren’t you?” 

It was Arthur’s turn to prop himself up on his elbow, looking down at Eames. “Not jealous. Just never knew that about you.” 

“There’s not much cause for fencing these days, and that’s a damn shame.” 

“I feel the exact same way about jousting tournaments,” said Arthur, deadpan. “Why did you ever even _learn_ it?” 

“I was naturally drawn to a sport in which I got to wield with considerable expertise a phallic figure,” replied Eames, smiling when that won him a glimpse of dimples from Arthur. “Also, one of my very first jobs involved forging a fencer. So I learned.”

“Forging a _fencer_ ,” echoed Arthur, sounding dubious. “We’re talking about fencing with swords, right, not fencing stolen goods?” 

“Fencing with _epees_ , Arthur,” Eames corrected him gravely. 

“Fuck off,” Arthur said, but smiled. Then he said, “I didn’t even know people still fenced.” 

“Bored, rich, British aristocrats do it.” 

“Do you think that’s what we do?” mused Arthur. 

“What?” 

“Is dreamsharing just something bored, rich adrenaline junkies do? Is it the equivalent of fencing?” 

“Of course not,” Eames said. “For starters, dreamsharing is actually a legitimate, in-demand skill to have.” 

“It’s not legitimate, Eames.” Arthur sounded faintly amused. 

“It’s legitimate _for some people_.” 

“It’s not legitimate for us.” 

Eames looked at him, curious. “And does that bother you?”

“No.” Arthur flopped onto his back, depriving Eames of the ability to read his expression. “It doesn’t. Can you imagine me being _legitimate_?” 

Eames snorted. “Very easily.” 

Arthur looked at him in surprise, a sideways glance on the bed. “Can you really?”

Eames looked back at him the same way and reconsidered. Because Arthur dressed like an accountant and maybe Eames teased him about how neat and orderly he was, but Arthur came alive during the most illegitimate moments of a dreamshare. And Eames knew that, because that was part of why Eames had been so helplessly fascinated by Arthur for so very long, the idea that there was a kindred spirit lurking in him and Eames just had to worm his way past that waistcoat to get at him. So Eames reconsidered his automatic teasing response. “No, actually. I think you might possibly be the most dangerous criminal I’ve ever met. You just hide it better than most.” 

Arthur smiled, the feral sort of smile that he smiled when he was getting ready to do something incredibly likely to kill him. “That’s what makes me so dangerous.” Arthur pointed at him, his face mock-stern. “And _you_ have completely failed to appreciate how very threatening I am.” 

“It’s because I’ve seen your pink-striped socks.” 

“Common mistake,” Arthur said. 

“Oh, do you wear those socks to lull people into a false sense of security?” 

“I do.”

“And then you strangle people with them, I suppose.” 

“Suffocate. Wad them into a ball and stuff them down your throat.” 

“If you ever try to suffocate me, it had better be for a good reason. Otherwise I’ll just come back and haunt you.” 

“I don’t believe in ghosts.” 

“I’d haunt your subconscious and you know it.” 

Something shuttered in Arthur’s eyes, and he shifted to look back up at the ceiling, and Eames wanted to take the misstep back, whatever it had been, because Arthur had just been so open and teasing and _lovely_. “Yes,” he said. “I have no doubt.” 

“But if it’s for a good reason,” Eames persisted, trying to get them back on the right footing, “I’d leave you alone.” 

Arthur sighed. “Isn’t your very _existence_ a good reason to suffocate you?” He didn’t say it like his heart was in it though, which made Eames inexplicably sad. 

Eames looked up at the ceiling and said, after a moment, “When you’re properly angry with me, I do find you terrifying. The way you were in Rio. I thought, ‘Jesus Christ, this bloke is going to break into my house one night and put a bullet in my forehead because I shagged two birds and fucked his dreamshare up a bit.’”

“I should have, for that.” Arthur sounded a bit better, as if they were back on ground he was comfortable with. “I would have if you hadn’t been hit in the head with a rolling pin. I thought it was possible you’d learned your lesson from that.” 

“Mostly what I learned was to only fuck up when I was working with other point men.” 

“Which I’ve noticed and much appreciate.” Arthur paused. “Although, to be honest, when I hear those stories, I generally think the blame lies with the point man.” 

“For trusting me?” 

“No, for not trusting you _enough_. Isn’t that the skill of a point man? Knowing when to cede control? Most common point man mistake.” 

“You should write yourself a handbook,” said Eames lightly to cover up that he felt a bit off-balance with the praise. “It’d be a bestseller.” 

“And give away all my secrets? Never.” Arthur shifted to look over at Eames again. “When did you stop being terrified of me? There must have been a moment when you decided I wasn’t going to put a bullet in your brain.” 

“The fact that you never have, Arthur, with anyone. You have this ridiculous reputation out there, but the truth is I’ve never seen you ever do anything to anyone who hadn’t crossed you first. The trick to working with you is to understand that your loyalty is precious beyond anything else in dreamsharing, that a person with you behind them is the safest person on the planet. A clever dreamsharer wouldn’t ever cross that, because why would you?” 

There was a long moment of silence. Arthur’s eyes were dark and narrow, flickering over Eames’s face, and Eames wondered what he was thinking, wondering if he’d given too much away. Finally Arthur said, “You should write yourself a handbook: _How to Work with Arthur._ ”

Eames grinned at him. “And give away your secret? And tell people how to work with you by being more like me? Aww, darling, I’m touched. I always knew you loved being teased so dreadfully.” 

Arthur almost— _almost_ ¬—blushed. Eames stared at him in wonder. He said, “Look, you’re a pretty terrible person, and I hate you a lot, but you do your job in the end and there are worse things.” 

Eames pulled out his totem and looked at it pointedly. “So this _is_ reality.” 

“Dick,” Arthur sighed. 

“You just seldom say such lovely things to me.” 

“I said that you’re terrible and I hate you _a lot_.” 

“But that there are worse things than me. I shall cherish this confession forever, petal. What’s worse than me? I’m dying to know.” 

“Almost nothing,” said Arthur. “Almost _nothing_ is worse than you. Very few things. You’re worse than almost everything else in the world.” 

“I know what’s worse than me: shirts that can be machine-washed rather than dry cleaned. Am I right?” 

“I take it back. You actually are the worst thing in the world.” 

“Worse than paisley? I had the impression you really, really hated paisley.” 

“I’m going to suffocate you with my socks,” Arthur told him. 

Eames chuckled. Because there was something very wrong with him, he liked being threatened by Arthur; it was almost the same as a declaration of love in Arthurspeak. So Eames smiled up at the ceiling and let silence fall. And then picked up on something Arthur had said earlier. “Are you bored?”

“No, thinking,” Arthur responded. 

“No, I don’t mean right now. I mean: in general. You said we were like bored, rich, British aristocrats, and, while we might be rich, you’re neither British nor an aristocrat. So what about the ‘bored’ bit?” 

“No, I said we were like bored, rich adrenaline junkies.” 

“Okay, conceding the adrenaline junkie bit of that, what about the bored bit?” 

Arthur seemed to consider the question before deciding, “I’m not bored. I just…I _was_ , before, before I found this.” Arthur twisted again to be able to meet his eyes. “Weren’t you?” 

Eames didn’t think he’d ever even had the luxury of getting bored in those days. Then again, when he compared life now to life then, it _did_ seem undeniably boring. He said, “I don’t know. I never thought of it that way, but yes. I guess. Probably.” Eames considered, then added, “Take it from me, though: It beats the hell out of fencing.”


	14. Chapter 14

Chapter 14

Arthur laid on the bed and looked up at the ceiling and really, honestly thought about the dreamshare. He did this sometimes, because a great deal of being a point man was just _thinking_ , taking what you’d learned and spinning it out into a million scenarios so that you could account for almost anything that might happen. Arthur had laid on beds in hotel rooms and hovels in most cities of the world, staring up at ceilings with various amounts of stains, considering problems from every angle, trying to see the things he might have missed. 

It was better doing it with Eames next to him. He had never done it with Eames next to him before. He didn’t normally do it in front of the team. Thinking in front of a team— _really_ thinking—was impossible. They were distracting, always talking, asking him questions, because if you were just staring off into space, people assumed you weren’t busy. Whereas Arthur was often at his busiest when he was staring off into space. 

So normally he did this part of his job alone, but he wasn’t alone at the moment, and Eames was quiet next to him. Arthur didn’t ask him to leave because actually he wasn’t distracting, he was merely…comforting. Like…it was nice not to be alone. Arthur didn’t focus on that pathetic thought; Arthur focused on the job. So he wasn’t sure how long Eames was asleep before he realized it. 

When he did realize it, he spent a little while watching him sleep. Eames’s head was turned in Arthur’s direction, his stupid lower lip pouting outward in a lax invitation, and Arthur smiled at him. Arthur smiled at him the way he never let himself smile at him. He thought of leaning forward and pressing a kiss to his forehead, to the bridge of his nose, to the patches of stubble his terrible shaving had left behind. But he settled for the luxury of smiling, before deciding that if he stayed here any longer he’d end up curling into Eames more closely, seeing if he thought better if he fitted his head into the curve of Eames’s neck. 

So Arthur reluctantly rolled himself out of the bed. 

Eames didn’t quite wake, not entirely. He flinched, a reaction Arthur recognized, soon to be followed, Arthur thought, by the flailing for the nonexistent gun. But instead Eames snuffled and mumbled, “Darling?” 

“Yeah,” Arthur heard himself answer. “Just me. Go back to sleep.” 

“Mmph,” said Eames, settling himself. 

Arthur looked down at him and thought of Sherlock’s question. _So who else does he say them to?_ No one, thought Arthur. When Eames said “darling,” he meant “Arthur.” So much so that it had always been recognized by the other members of whatever team they were on. It wasn’t an all-purpose affectation; it was, as far as Arthur had ever seen, an Arthur-specific habit. 

_He does it to annoy you_ , Arthur thought. _He does it because he thinks you find it unprofessional, and he loves to be as unprofessional as possible around you._

And Arthur thought that was true, but it was also true that he responded to it these days as if it were his name, barely noticed that it was unprofessional and instead just slotted it in as _what Eames calls you_. If anybody else tried it, he’d break a few of their fingers, he thought. He really did let Eames get away with fucking _murder_. 

And if Eames ever stopped, or ever did it to anyone else, Arthur would be absolutely bereft. 

Arthur sighed at himself and stretched and walked out into the living area and set up the loaned laptop on the dining room table. He was yawning as he settled into a chair to work, and he thought longingly of the bed that Eames was currently cuddled into, and then he got up and walked over to the phone and fixed the damn thing so that he could call down to room service for a pot of coffee. The phone was more complicated to fix than he had initially supposed, and by the time it was finished he was much more awake, and the pot of coffee on the way made him feel accomplished. 

Arthur sat back down at the laptop and checked his email. There was an email from Sherlock with the subject line _Compound Chemical Equations_. Arthur wrinkled his nose at it and decided to email Mycroft first. 

_Eames and I need access to some of the dreamsharers Moriarty drove insane. Please kick them out of limbo and have them ready for us. The most recent ones would be best—the less time they’ve spent in limbo, the better, I think. Timeline is up to you but we’d be ready tomorrow. Otherwise, tomorrow Eames has indicated a desire to show me the Tate Britain. –Arthur._

Arthur sent the email just as his pot of coffee arrived, so he fixed himself a cup of coffee and tipped back in his chair to read Sherlock’s email. Arthur excelled in a lot of different areas, but chemistry had never been his favorite. He’d taught himself enough to get by—and his definition of “get by” was much more stringent than other people’s—but he’d always felt self-consciously stupid when it came to the hard science side of dreamsharing. Sherlock’s chemical babblings made his head hurt, and it took him a good hour and a series of scribbled out diagrams on scrap paper before he understood what Sherlock was saying about “shallow depth” and “deep shallows.” Sometimes, Arthur thought, rubbing at the headache that had developed behind his eyes and reaching for more caffeine, being a criminal wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. 

Arthur wrote him back. _It makes sense in theory. I am unaware of hidden dreamsharing chemistry articles such as you request, but I’ll do some digging for you. In the meantime, I hope to have a better idea of what Moriarty’s doing to the dreamsharers after Eames and I go into their heads, which I’ve asked Mycroft to arrange for us tomorrow. That may help determine the angle you want to take viz a viz the shallow depth / deep shallows problem you indicate. –Arthur._

Then, after a lot of thought, Arthur e-mailed Yusuf. _Eames and I are in the middle of a tricky dreamshare. Client has insisted we use a very specific chemist. Brilliant, but new-ish to dreamsharing. Has requested any black market scholarly articles on dreamsharing chemistry anyone may have written. I have never heard of any but thought I’d ask. Hope all is well, and congratulations on the baby. –Arthur._

Arthur read it over, decided it was a perfectly friendly email—Arthur tried to only send perfectly friendly emails, his job depended on the maintenance of lots and lots of sources of information—and also that the mention of Eames was necessary. Arthur had worked with Yusuf only the one time, having avoided everyone from the inception job except for Eames and, inevitably, Cobb afterward, but Eames clearly considered Yusuf a friend, and Arthur wasn’t above capitalizing on that. He didn’t think he’d get any useful answer, because dreamsharers didn’t tend to conduct scientific studies on what they were doing, but Arthur supposed anything was possible; maybe the chemists in the business did exchange such things with each other. 

Arthur sent the email to Yusuf and then sent another one to Mycroft. _Forgot to mention—we need blood tests on Eames, Sherlock, and John ASAP. –Arthur._

As soon as he sent it, a new email from Mycroft popped up. Arthur looked at the time on his laptop and decided to be grudgingly impressed that Mycroft was working through the night. _The dreamsharers will be available for you tomorrow. Be ready at 8 a.m. –Mycroft Holmes._ Arthur checked the time again and decided again that Mycroft Holmes was a bastard. So Arthur was pleased when he got Mycroft’s next email. _Do not tell my brother of your ongoing dreamsharing plans. –Mycroft Holmes._ Too late for that, thought Arthur smugly. The next email made Arthur even happier. _Also, do not order any more room service. –Mycroft Holmes._

***

Eames was not dreaming, but he thought he was because he woke to Arthur’s voice murmuring his name in his ear. 

Eames could also feel his totem digging into his leg where it was trapped in his pocket and being sprawled on by Eames, so this was apparently real life. Real life, and Arthur was talking in his ear. 

Eames opened one eye. Arthur. Yes. Right there. Gray striped shirt, contrasting darker gray waistcoat with little diamonds in the pattern, tie that was an ordered swirl of soft colors that popped against the gray. Hair slicked ruthlessly back. Skin smoothly shaved. Eames took all of him in in one glance, well enough to forge him, then closed his eye, just to make Arthur say his name again. Because Eames wasn’t above such things. 

“Yes, love,” Eames mumbled. 

“I need you to be awake right now,” said Arthur. 

“Are we about to die?” asked Eames. 

“No.” 

“Are you going to ravish me?”

“Also no.” 

“Come back later, darling,” Eames decided. 

Arthur ignored him. “Mycroft is sending a car for us in twenty minutes to get into the dreamsharers’ heads.” 

Eames opened an eye again. “Twenty minutes?” 

“Yes.”

“Fine. Wake me up again in ten.”

“Wait. First I need you to sweet-talk the room service lady for me.” Arthur held out a phone. 

The hotel phone. Eames looked at it uncomprehendingly. “What?”

“Last night I fixed the phone, but Mycroft told room service not to deliver to us, but I want you to get us two real breakfasts.”

“You fixed the phone,” said Eames. “Why are you such a fucking show-off all the time?”

“Do you or do you not want real food instead of croissants, Eames?”

“Of course I bloody want real food.” 

“Then do your thing.”

“Is this you admitting that I am more charming than you are?” 

“This is me admitting that _other people_ seem to think you’re more charming than me, even though they’re wrong about that.” 

Eames took the phone from him. “I don’t know why other people don’t find you charming. Do you threaten to suffocate them with your pink-striped socks? That’s definitely your go-to _piece de resistance_.” 

Arthur sighed and dialed the phone. “They don’t find me charming because, _apparently_ , I am rude and mean.”

Eames listened to it ring and said, “Don’t be so hard on yourself, darling. You’re mostly just condescending, remember.” 

“Room service,” answered a brisk female voice on the phone. 

“Hello,” Eames purred at her. “Good morning to you. And what a fabulous morning it is, too. Are you having a good morning?” 

Arthur rolled his eyes at him and walked away, over to the dresser. Eames watched the curve of his arse in those ridiculously tight trousers he insisted on wearing at all times and completely missed what the woman said to him. 

“I’d murder a full English breakfast,” he said, keeping his seduction voice on, even as he was thinking that he was salivating for something completely different. “Is that something your lovely self could provide me with?” 

“Yes, absolutely,” said the woman. 

“Two, if possible. I’m _very_ hungry. And some hot chocolate, would you?” Arthur turned away from the dresser and frowned at him. 

“Hot chocolate,” she echoed. 

“Love to start the day with something sweet. Most people do, which is surely why they’ve staffed _you_ in the morning,” said Eames jovially, winking at Arthur, who continued to scowl delightfully at him. 

He could practically hear the blush traveling down the line to him. She said, “We’ll send it up to you right away in the— Oh.” 

Eames knew that she’d just realized what room he was staying in and what directive had been put on it. “You are simply the employee of the year,” Eames assured her heartily. 

“But we can’t—”

“I am going on the website right now to sing your praises,” said Eames, as if she hadn’t spoken, and quickly hung up the phone. “Child’s play,” he told Arthur. 

“Yeah, we’ll see if it shows up. Hot chocolate?” Arthur leaned against the dresser and crossed his arms and gave Eames a disapproving look. 

Eames got himself out of bed and walked over to the closet and pushed aside the ninety percent of the clothing in it that belonged to Arthur. “No reason to hide that it’s your favorite anymore.” 

“I _knew_ I shouldn’t have said anything about it. What happened to things in a dream not counting?” 

“Arthur,” Eames said in exasperation, selecting a shirt. “I don’t care what you _drink_ , for fuck’s sake. How many minutes until Mycroft sends his car?”

Arthur glanced at his watch. “Seventeen.” 

“Then I will be ready in eighteen,” said Eames, and walked into the bathroom. 

***

The food showed up. Arthur was torn between being pleased at having a proper breakfast and being irritated that Eames had been effective. Granted, Arthur had handed him the ability to be smug about this, but still.

Arthur attacked his breakfast and mixed together some hot chocolate and coffee and glanced over his notes and contemplated their plan of attack. 

Eames did not take eighteen minutes to get ready. In fact, he took considerably less than that. And even though his shirt was, as usual, just the slightest bit too much, he looked pulled together and good enough to eat. He sat at the coffee table and tackled his own breakfast and Arthur thought how much he would have liked it if this could always be how his mornings went. 

“How’s the hot chocolate?” Eames asked him. 

“I didn’t have any,” Arthur lied. 

Eames winked at him because Eames was annoying. “So what’s the plan, pet?” 

“Simple. Basic. We’ll use one of my dreams. A botanical garden. Not much to it, not much trouble to get into.” 

“And how are we going to determine what Moriarty did? Do you want me to forge him?”

Arthur hadn’t really considered that because he hadn’t thought it possible. They had seen Moriarty only once, briefly. “Could you?”

Eames leaned back, sipping his coffee. Eames took his coffee black. Arthur, who loaded his coffee with cream and sugar because of the regrettable fact that Sherlock was right and he didn’t actually like coffee, didn’t know how he could stand it. “Well enough, for a bit.”

Arthur considered. “We’ll save that. I think we should just ask. See if it works. With any luck, they’ll think they’re dreaming about a pleasant outing in a garden and their subconscious is refusing to let them enjoy it.” 

Eames shrugged. “Works for me. So what color are your socks today?” 

“Not actually relevant to the dreamshare,” Arthur pointed out. 

Eames leaned forward and put a hand on Arthur’s knee, tugging up his pant leg just enough to see his socks, and Arthur really wished that he didn’t automatically sway in Eames’s direction whenever Eames touched him. “Gray,” Eames said. “Somewhat disappointing.” 

“They match my vest.” Arthur meant it to sound defensive, but he thought it just sounded conversational. As if he wanted to encourage such an inane topic of conversation. 

“It’s a waistcoat, darling,” Eames corrected. 

“I didn’t know you knew fashion vocabulary beyond ‘shirt’ and ‘pants.’”

Eames paused. “When you say ‘pants’…” 

Arthur rolled his eyes. “Stop it. I love how you’re only British when it suits you, you know.” 

“Pish-posh, not so, my adorable little crumpet,” said Eames, and actually _tapped Arthur on the nose_. Arthur, caught between being horrified and _embarrassingly charmed beyond belief_ , ducked his head away and made a noise that he hoped could be interpreted as complaint. “Cheerio,” Eames continued. “Cor, blimey.” 

“What the fuck are you even _doing_ right now?” Arthur asked. 

“I say, being British, poppet. And I’m jolly good at it, too.”

“This is what you’re like when you go too long without having a gun shoved in your face. You just get progressively more annoying.”

“Are you saying I need to be properly threatened every so often?” Eames asked, with a leer. 

Arthur shook his head in exasperation and stood. He had to push Eames aside a bit to do it, and he wondered when he’d let Eames so thoroughly invade his personal space. He gathered together a couple of pieces of paper uselessly, just to give himself an excuse for having extracted himself from the couch. 

“You just threatened me last night with suffocation, old chap,” Eames reminded him, as the elevator slid open and Mycroft walked into the lobby. “What ho!” exclaimed Eames. “If it isn’t the guv’nah now.” 

Mycroft just looked at him, then at the food, then at Arthur, then he walked back onto the elevator, using his umbrella to hold the door open. Arthur looked at Eames, who looked back at him and grinned. 

***

Mycroft gave them files on the most recent dreamsharer to fall victim to Moriarty’s subconscious. Eames let Arthur have them, and Arthur skimmed through them as the car whisked them off to whatever top-secret government institution they were going to. 

Mycroft said, “I would appreciate it if you refrained from telling my brother anything he doesn’t need to know about this entire operation.” 

“He needs to know everything,” said Arthur, not even bothering to look up from the files. 

“He has insisted he be present here today.”

“Good,” said Arthur. “He’ll get a first-hand account of what we learn so we know what we’re up against and how the compound should be constructed.”

“You know what happens when dreamsharers don’t know everything about an operation?” said Eames, next to him, flatly. “People die.”

Arthur didn’t look over at him, but Arthur knew Eames had been on bad dreamshares where there had been casualties. Arthur never had been, because Arthur was very, very good at his job, but the inception job had been a near thing, and that had been the direct result of secrets. 

“Speaking of secrets,” said Mycroft drily, and something about his tone made Arthur look up. Mycroft reached into his coat and extracted from it what Arthur immediately recognized as his cell phone. “I do believe you owe Mr. Cobb a weekly text so that he doesn’t become alarmed about your well-being.” 

Out of the corner of his eye, Arthur saw Eames’s eyebrows skid up his forehead and refused to acknowledge it. He took the phone without comment and scrolled through the texted images of James and Philippa, sun-kissed photos of them grinning at life in general. Arthur hit reply and automatically dodged when Mycroft made a movement to take the phone back. 

“I’ll reply for you,” Mycroft said evenly, hand out. 

“You’re worried about my replying to a text when I’ve been emailing whoever I want,” Arthur pointed out. 

Mycroft cocked an eyebrow at him. “Have you been? Unsupervised?” 

“If you’re reading my emails, how did the email to Sherlock telling him about today’s activities get out?” 

“Haven’t you ever made a personnel mistake, Arthur?” asked Mycroft lightly. 

After a moment of contemplating that his email had been hacked and he should have anticipated that and he really hated Mycroft Holmes, Arthur handed his phone over. 

“If you would dictate?” said Mycroft. 

This whole thing was ridiculous. There was no way Arthur was going to get Dom involved in this disaster, and anyway he had it mostly under control at the moment, so he said, “Just ask him why the kids are still getting so big when I’ve said frequently that they should stop growing now.” Arthur went back to the files and refused to acknowledge Eames in any way. He practically buried his nose into the folder he was holding. He could fucking _hear_ Eames’s faint amusement radiating out to him. 

Mycroft texted and tucked the phone back into his jacket, and Arthur seethed at being held _prisoner_ and couldn’t wait to get this whole thing over with and have his gun back and have _control_ again. 

They reached their destination and were led through a warren of rooms. Why were all British buildings hopeless warrens of rooms? wondered Arthur. Eventually they reached a depressing, windowless room which contained a single bed, on which was stretched out the wasting-away figure of Sarah Miller, once, not long ago, a vibrant and outgoing 28-year-old with a promising, government-sanctioned dreamsharing career in front of her. There were chairs around the bed, and a PASIV, a more advanced model than the one Arthur had acquired at great expense (although not, Arthur told himself confidently, a _better_ model). John Watson was sitting in one of the chairs, looking less than pleased as usual. Sherlock Holmes was pacing around the room, talking a mile a minute. 

He bounced his way over to Arthur as soon as he entered. “You’re just going to use the standard Somnacin.” 

“Yes,” affirmed Arthur, because there was no reason to get fancy. 

“Then I can come with you.” 

“No,” said Arthur. 

“But—”

“No. We don’t know what we’re going to find in there; I’m not taking you in. Frankly, I hate that I’m taking _Eames_ in there with me.” 

“Then why does he get to go?” said Sherlock sulkily. 

Because Arthur didn’t know what he would find, needed back-up to get out of the dream quickly if necessary, and Eames really did need to see it all first-hand since Eames was going to have to go into Moriarty’s head with him eventually. Arthur couldn’t do everything alone, and Arthur was a good point man who admitted that. Arthur just said to Sherlock, “Because I said so,” and then hated how stupid that sounded. 

But John Watson quirked a smile at him as if he approved of that. 

Eames had already settled himself into a chair and inserted a needle. Arthur had been telling the truth on the bed the night before: Eames did his job, always, without hesitation. 

Arthur said, taking his own seat and studying the PASIV to make sure it was up to his expectations (and wondering if he should take his own for the Moriarty job; something to file away in his head until he could make a note of it in his notebook to ponder later), “As soon as we come back topside, we’ll fill you in on everything.” 

Sherlock scoffed disgustedly. “Second-hand research. What good will that do me? I might as well have nothing at all.” 

Arthur decided there was nothing more to be gained from further conversation. “Five minutes,” he announced to the room at large, and then pressed the button.


	15. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a very un-Christmas-y chapter. Trigger warning for descriptions of violence. I don't think it's anything too gory but these are unpleasant dreams and they needed to be unpleasant enough to rattle Eames and Arthur so nothing good is about to happen in this fic.

Chapter 15

Arthur liked his botanical garden dream. He was proud of it. There wasn’t much to it, but it was ideal when you wanted something streamlined, with not a lot to worry about. 

He didn’t even get the chance to notice if the dream had come in correctly, because Arthur immediately found himself on his back. Sarah Miller leaned over him, her red hair in a wild cloud all around her head.

“Sarah—” Arthur began.

And she _hissed_ at him.

Probably not a good sign. 

Arthur tried again, attempting to get back to the dream he’d set up for them, to relax Sarah enough to get information from her. “Isn’t it a lovely day—”

And then she _broke his finger_. 

Arthur had had his fingers broken before, in dreams and out of them, and it was never pleasant. He jerked in reaction and bit down on his curse. And Sarah didn’t let go. Sarah twisted his finger and twisted it again, and Arthur blinked through a fog of horrified pain and tried to get her off of him, and then she was knocked abruptly aside. Which didn’t lessen the pain in his finger at all. Arthur gasped and tried to get his bearings, and then Eames pressed the muzzle of a gun between his eyes and pulled the trigger. 

***

Arthur woke and checked his finger reflexively. It throbbed with a phantom pain from the dream, which Arthur knew was all in his head, because his finger was fine. 

“That wasn’t five minutes,” Sherlock said, watching him. 

Eames woke up before Arthur could respond. “Bloody buggering _fuck_ ,” said Eames eloquently. 

Arthur could feel everyone looking between them. 

“What the hell was that?” demanded Eames, pulling the needle out and standing. “She was on us before we could even get in. Who taught her that?”

“She _has_ been militarized,” Mycroft began. 

“Shut up,” Eames said, keeping his eyes on Arthur. “We get around militarization all the time.”

“She caught me by surprise,” Arthur snapped. “You didn’t need to shoot us out of there; I would have recovered.” 

“You were planning a _garden party_ , Arthur, and she was trying to twist your bloody finger off, in case you didn’t notice. We need a new plan.” 

“We’ll be prepared with the next one—”

“No,” Eames shot back. “New plan. We’re not going to walk into a botanical garden and have _tea_ with these people, Arthur. Whatever Moriarty did to them, we’re not going to reason our way into it.”

“This was _one dreamsharer_ ,” said Arthur. “It’s reckless to draw a conclusion based on one experience. For all we know, Sarah Miller was always a bit…” Arthur couldn’t even come up with an adjective. 

“You read the files,” Eames retorted. “Don’t pretend that you don’t know exactly how she always was.” 

“She attacked you in the dream?” Sherlock deduced, sounding fiercely excited about it. 

“She attacked Arthur,” said Eames. “Then I attacked her. And then I shot him. And that wasn’t militarization. I’ve seen militarization. That was—”

“It was insanity, Eames. You said it yourself, about going into an insane person’s head. I don’t think we can know what we’re going to get here. Now calm down. It was a broken finger in a fucking dream. During the Boise job you let me suffocate slowly in an avalanche and didn’t seem to mind,” Arthur reminded him. 

“You’re still holding a grudge about the Boise job?” 

“I don’t hold grudges,” Arthur denied, even though he absolutely held lots and lots of grudges and was still bitter about the Boise job. 

“Arthur, I didn’t have time to dig you out of a fucking avalanche when I was trying to convincingly forge a _nine-year-old girl_.” 

“You could have tried talking to Sarah Miller,” Arthur snapped at him. “You didn’t even try.” 

“Fine,” bit out Eames. “Do you want to try talking to Sarah fucking Miller? Fine. Let’s try talking to her.” Eames sat back down and reinserted his needle. 

“Just a minute—” Mycroft began. 

Eames glared over at Arthur and commanded, “Press the fucking button.” 

“Fine.” Arthur leaned over and did it before anyone could stop him. 

***

Arthur was tied up. Bloody hell, thought Eames, how was Arthur managing to get into the dream _already_ at a disadvantage? 

“Sarah,” Arthur was saying, his voice very calm and patient. “Isn’t it a lovely day?” 

Eames decided that as soon as they got back topside, he was just going to strangle Arthur. This woman was clearly desperately insane, and he was trying to make small talk with her. Sometimes Eames didn’t even understand how Arthur was _real_ , but he’d checked his totem enough in Arthur’s presence to know that he apparently did exist. 

They were in Arthur’s botanical garden dream. At least, Eames assumed they were. He assumed Arthur had miles of gorgeous gardens laid out for this dream, but Eames didn’t have time to admire them because right now Arthur was tied up on the ground and crazy Sarah Miller was humming softly to herself as she loomed over him. Tuneless, terrifying humming. Eames looked around him to get his bearings in the dream and tried to decide what approach to take. Whatever had been done to Sarah Miller’s subconscious, he thought, it had made her extremely suspicious. 

“A lovely day to cut—you—up,” announced Sarah in a sing-song voice, and punctuated her words with the slicing of a pair of scissors she wielded over her head. 

No, seriously, _bloody hell_ , thought Eames. He didn’t react very well to Arthur being _tortured_ in front of him, thank you very much. Letting him suffocate in an avalanche because he’d needed to hold together the rest of the dream was one thing. Standing by and watching someone twist Arthur’s finger off his body was quite another thing entirely, and Eames couldn’t understand how Arthur couldn’t see the difference. 

“Sarah, that’s not necessary,” said Arthur, his voice still even and unhurried, because Arthur was an _idiot_. 

“You have too many _ears_ ,” Sarah told Arthur. 

Fuck this, thought Eames, and dreamed himself up a mirror and frowned into it in intense concentration. _Think like him_ , he told himself. _Be him_. He almost shuddered with the effort of making himself ice-cold and empty inside. When he dropped the mirror, forge complete, Sarah was still humming her creepy-as-fuck tune and was now dancing the scissors over Arthur’s ear in a demented caress. 

“Can we talk about Moriarty?” Arthur asked. 

Sarah sliced at Arthur’s earlobe, not enough to cut it off, just enough to make it bleed. Arthur winced a bit. Sarah said, “ _No_.” 

“What a pity,” Eames said. “Now that I’ve come to join the party and all.” He didn’t know if he sounded like Moriarty, but he did know that he _looked_ like him. 

Sarah looked up from Arthur, seeming to register Eames for the first time. Except that she wasn’t registering Eames at all. Her eyes widened and she held the scissors out to point at him. “It’s _you_ ,” she exclaimed, and then ran at him. 

Maybe forging Moriarty hadn’t been a good idea.

***

Forging Moriarty was such a _fucking terrible idea_ , thought Arthur. Eames deflected the scissors, dreamed himself up a gun, held it to Sarah’s forehead, and said, “Look, we just want to talk.” 

“Do it,” Sarah said, glaring up at Eames-as-Moriarty. “Finish it off. After you left me this way. _This way_.” She gestured to Arthur, still tied up on the ground like an idiot, as if he was Exhibit A in her museum of insanity. 

“Maybe we could revisit all of that,” said Eames. “Relive how I got you this way.” 

Wrong thing to say, thought Arthur. 

Sarah’s eyes narrowed. “You’re a terrible, awful person,” she whispered. 

And then she literally gouged Eames’s eye out with a clawing hand. Eames howled with pain, flailing a bit. The gun went off but the bullet just flew harmlessly up off into the sky. Eames stumbled backward, cursing up a storm, his hand to his eye, blood gushing from it. Arthur cursed his inability to dream his way out of the solid ropes around him and instead dreamed up a rake next to him, because a gun would not have been helpful with his arms tied behind his back. 

Arthur was busy positioning himself just right over the rake, so he wasn’t paying much attention to what was going on with Eames and Sarah. There was scuffling happening, Eames attempting to fight back with one eye having literally been torn out of its socket. Arthur heard Sarah say, “ _You_ have too many ears, too,” and Eames cried out. Arthur squeezed his eyes shut and contemplated his career choice and impaled the rake through his throat. 

He woke up still with the memory of choking on his own blood, but wasted no time in clumsily scrambling over to Eames’s chair and just knocking it over. Not the most finessed kick he’d ever given but he didn’t fucking care at the moment. And it was possible that Mycroft and Sherlock were both demanding to know what was happening, but Arthur just waited for the moment when Eames hit the ground and opened his eyes. 

Eames woke up with a gasp and pressed one hand reflexively to his eye and the other to his ear. 

“You’re fine,” Arthur told him, panting, as much to reassure himself as to reassure Eames, and leaned against the wall and tried to get his adrenaline down. 

Everyone was staring at them. 

Eames collapsed against the wall next to Arthur and said, “Newest plan: We are never going into Sarah Miller’s brain ever again.” 

***

They wanted to know what had happened. Eames couldn’t be bothered to tell them, but luckily he was working with Arthur, and Arthur was good at handling client relations, so Eames tipped his head back against the wall and let Arthur give a very professional rundown of: _So then she took her fingers and pulled Eames’s eyeball out_. Eames resisted the urge to touch his eyeball. He knew it was there. He had been in dreamsharing long enough to be able to shake off what happened in a dream. But still, it did take a measure of self-control to do it, and he allowed himself the comfort of sneaking his hand into his pocket and turning the poker chip over, reassuring himself of the reality of the here and now and his two eyes and two ears. 

“It isn’t surprising that she has defenses,” Mycroft was saying. “We militarize our people—”

“This isn’t fucking militarization,” Eames said wearily. “How many times do we have to tell you? We deal with militarization all the time. This isn’t it.” 

“ _Government_ militarization—” Mycroft began. 

Eames picked his head up and looked at him. “Mycroft, if you think you need to talk to us about government-style militarization, your files on us are severely lacking.” Then he looked at Arthur. “You start the dream off wrong. I mean, we get into the dream, and you’ve _already_ been attacked. The dream’s starting mid-attack. How is she doing that?” 

Arthur opened his mouth, but John beat him to it. “She doesn’t want to dream.” 

Eames looked at John for a second, momentarily uncomprehending. Because dreamsharers who could no longer dream forgot that there were people who didn’t long for the release of a naturally occurring dreamscape. 

John said, “If your dream, night after night, was actually a nightmare—if you couldn’t close your eyes without being pulled into something terrible—if you were a government operative trained in the art of arming your self-conscious, wouldn’t you shut down every possible dream before it started?” 

There was a moment of silence. Eames watched Sherlock as he studied John closely. Eames thought of dreaming, every time he closed his eyes, of Arthur crying out in pain as his finger was nearly torn off, of hands digging out Eames’s own eyeball. He shuddered and was about to agree when Arthur said, “Yes. Yes, that makes sense.”

“And it makes sense why you start the dream mid-attack,” Eames added. “It’s your dream. You’re the one running the architecture. She’s guarding against _you_.” 

“So she shuts me down right away. She doesn’t even notice you until you force her to notice you.” 

“By protecting you.” 

“If you left me alone, let her do whatever she wants to me, she’d leave you alone.” 

“No. Bad idea.” Eames shook his head. “I’m not going to go snoop around her subconscious while she’s otherwise occupied _torturing_ you.” 

“It’s just a dream, Eames—”

As if that mattered to Eames’s ability to handle Arthur’s torture, ultimately. Eames snapped, “Exactly. Sooner or later she’d kill you and it would collapse around me, and you know I hate that.” 

“Oh, sorry if you have an unpleasant wake-up call,” drawled Arthur sarcastically. “I’ll try to endure the torture as long as I can for you.” 

“When you say ‘it’s Arthur’s dream,’ you mean he’s setting up the scenario you’re in,” Sherlock clarified. 

“Yeah,” said Eames. “Her head, but Arthur’s architecture in it.” 

“Do you have to go in with an architecture?” asked Sherlock. 

Arthur tipped his head. “I…” He looked at Eames. “I don’t know, actually. I suppose you could just…let the dreamer do the dreaming?” 

“I’ve done it,” Eames agreed. “It’s messy for an extraction—it’s why it never gets done, you want to know your way around in an extraction. But I tried it for an inception once. Thought it might make the subconscious more amenable to the planting of the idea, if it felt so entirely in control.”

“Did it work?” asked Arthur. 

“No. But that’s because the inception didn’t work. The dream was perfectly fine, if ridiculous. It involved a sinking ship. How bloody obvious can one’s subconscious be?” 

“So what you’re saying is it didn’t work but you learned a lot,” said Arthur, with a faint smile. 

Eames actually managed a smile in return. “I make it a habit never to learn from my mistakes.”

“I’ve noticed,” said Arthur, and then, “So we’ll go in without a dream.”

“No,” said Eames. “My plan was to never go into Sarah Miller’s head again.” 

“Then _I’ll_ go in without a dream.” 

Eames swore under his breath. “Well, _obviously_ , Arthur, I’m not letting you go into that funhouse bouncy castle of a head alone.” 

“I’ll be fine,” Arthur said briskly, picking himself up off the chair and dusting off his arse. Which was really not necessary to do directly in front of Eames’s face. 

“I’ll go with him,” Sherlock jumped in. 

“No,” said Eames, Arthur, John, and Mycroft in unison. 

Sherlock frowned. 

Eames pulled himself back up to his chair and said, “We’re trying this one more time, and then _definitely not again_ , yeah?”

“We’ll re-think our approach if this doesn’t work, yes,” Arthur agreed. “But if we go in without a dream, maybe we won’t attract any attention at all and we can just…get the lay of the land.” 

“Hang on,” said Eames, and checked his totem one last time. Yes. Still reality. 

Arthur’s eyebrows were lifted at him in query. 

“You’re encouraging a hare-brained scheme that is never going to work,” Eames pointed out. “It made sense that I would fear that this is one of my most cherished fantasies.” 

Arthur gave him a dark look and said, “Shut up and inject yourself.” 

***

They were standing on a barren landscape. In front of them was a line of barbed wire, running off in either direction as far as the eye could see. A red, dying sun was sitting low in the sky, casting everything into unpleasant shadows. It was ungodly hot, and Eames dreamed himself out of his jacket immediately and glanced at Arthur next to him. He was dressed in a three-piece suit, but he lost the jacket, too, as Eames watched. 

“So,” remarked Eames. “This looks like a very hospitable place. A veritable oasis. It’s obvious we must be dreaming such a lush, fantastic landscape.” 

“At least we’re not being tortured,” said Arthur. 

“Always a silver lining with you,” said Eames. 

“Two buildings,” Arthur said, and pointed. 

He was right. There was one several hundred yards to their left and one several hundred yards to their right. Dark, square boxes. Not a single detail on the outside to give away what they might be. 

“Warehouses?” Eames guessed. “To store all her grisly memories of whatever this bastard did to her?” 

“Then we need to get inside, don’t we?” 

“I bet one is filled with headless dolls, and the other is filled with dolls’ heads.” 

“You take the one on the left; I’ll take the one on the right.” 

“You think we should split up?” 

“We’ll be fine,” said Arthur, and pulled a Glock out of its holster. 

“ _Arthur_ ,” Eames sighed, and waved around an assault rifle. 

“Eames, if you’re not careful, I’m going to start to think that you’re compensating for something,” Arthur told him. 

Eames snorted. “Trust me, darling, you just never dream big enough.” 

“Go left, don’t get killed, don’t attract the attention of any projections, don’t kill anyone you don’t have to, and try to gain useful information.”

“As ever, thank you for those condescending instructions. I’m serious about the bet.” 

Arthur just looked at him in exasperation. “What bet?” 

“About the dolls.” 

“You think the warehouses are filled with dolls?” 

Eames shrugged. “Why not?”

Arthur sighed and shook his head. “We don’t have time for this.” 

“So take the bet, darling.” 

“What are we even betting?”

“All of the vodka in the world once this is over. Which of us will have to foot the bill.” 

“I support this bet,” Arthur decided. “You’re on.” 

“Good.” Eames paused and looked at Arthur and debated saying something really stupid like _Be careful_ , which was so unnecessary, because Arthur was always careful and always professional and really so very good at all of this. 

“What?” Arthur asked, when Eames just kept looking at him. 

Eames smiled at him. “Just good to see you with a gun in your hand again, love.” 

Arthur grinned back. “Likewise,” he said, then started walking off toward his assigned warehouse. 

***

Bloody hell, it was bloody, fucking hot, was what Eames was thinking as he reached his building. He was on the wrong side of the barbed wire, and he considered dreaming himself some wire cutters to get through it. But it’d probably set off some internal subconscious alarm of intruders. Eames hadn’t seen another soul for the entirety of his walk. So Eames sighed and got on his belly and crawled through the red dust of the soil. The barbed wire scraped up his back, which hurt like hell, but it was only a dream and he’d be fresh and new with no scars when he woke up, so he didn’t think too much about it. 

He cased the building carefully. He didn’t see any external cameras, and there was only one door and no windows, so his options for breaking in were limited. But when he got to the door it swung open easily in his hand. That gave him pause. She’d built herself a warehouse in her subconscious, surrounded it with barbed wire, and then she hadn’t even bothered to give it a lock? 

Except it wasn’t a warehouse. Sure, it looked that way at first, and Eames picked his way carefully through a crowded storage room of detritus, dreaming up a torch to give himself some light as he went. There was a lot of furniture and clothing in the room, but there were no dolls, so Eames supposed he was going to be responsible for buying them all the vodka in the world later. He was fine with that; he’d use a fake credit card. 

Eames was contemplating the promise of a drunk Arthur—drunk Arthur was _delightful_ , he giggled a lot and told terrible, stupid stories, and he dimpled deliciously at Eames, and Eames loved when jobs were over and had gone well enough that there was time for a celebratory drunken night on the town—when he reached a door. 

Eames looked at it for a second, then pressed his ear up against it. There was noise from beyond the door, but it was a distant murmur; it didn’t seem close. Assault rifle at the ready, he opened the door. It swung open soundlessly, and Eames realized he was backstage. This was some kind of…theater. And there was something happening onstage. He couldn’t see from this angle but he could hear, a single voice, raised so that it could project out to the audience. Eames followed it, the words growing clearer as he went. 

“She thought she’d come into my head and control _me_!” said the voice, and then it laughed, cold and brittle. Eames shivered, despite the oppressive heat in the theater, and knew immediately who the voice must belong to. “And now look at her, ladies and gentlemen! Look at her _dance_!” 

Eames found his way to the wings, keeping close to the shadows. The stage was lit brightly, and on it was Moriarty, dressed in a sharp suit that made Eames vaguely think of Arthur but exactly the opposite of how Arthur wore his sharp suits. Moriarty was walking around Sarah Miller, who was dressed in a tutu, her red hair pulled back into a tight bun, and she was twirling en pointe. Twirling twirling twirling. A hideous, tight, pained smile frozen onto her face. 

“That’s it, my dear!” said Moriarty, and clapped his hands. “Put on your show. Never stop, never stop. Because I’ll never let you. Put on your show for me. For _us_.” 

A spotlight landed directly on Eames. 

Eames said, “Fuck.”


	16. Chapter 16

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy New Year! I hope 2015 brings you everything that makes you happy!

Chapter 16

Arthur trudged through the landscape toward his warehouse and thought that it felt good to be doing a job that he felt he could do. It felt good not to be helplessly tied up and tortured. Arthur was seldom in a position where he needed to be rescued, and he was relieved to be back on footing he recognized. He was going to break into this warehouse, he was going to figure out what Sarah Miller had tucked away, he was going to come up with a good plan for the Moriarty job, he was going to collect a great deal of money, and he and Eames would live to break the law another day. 

Arthur’s pace slowed as he reached the warehouse, though, and his optimistic mood faded a bit. Because the warehouse wasn’t a warehouse at all. There was a red velvet rope flanking a short red carpet leading up to an open door, at which was standing a man who was clearly a bouncer. Arthur approached him slowly, gun drawn, but he didn’t even seem to acknowledge Arthur’s presence. As he got closer, he realized that he could hear a driving bass coming from inside. 

This was, unmistakably, a _nightclub_. 

Arthur paused at the open door, and the bouncer finally acknowledged him. By holding out a hand and saying, “No firearms inside, sir.” 

Of course not. Arthur handed the bouncer the Glock and dreamed a new one into the waistband of his trousers, tucked underneath his waistcoat. With any luck the bouncer wouldn’t frisk him. 

The bouncer didn’t. The bouncer took the surrendered Glock and inclined his head, stepping aside to let Arthur through. 

Arthur walked down a short, dark hallway, and then he found himself in an equally dark and very, very, very loud room. Very crowded room. There was a deejay on a stage up front, and the music was so loud that it was vibrating through Arthur’s body, and the dance floor was absolutely packed with people, all of them moving as if in one sweaty, writhing mass. It was so hot that Arthur felt his shirt soak through with sweat almost immediately. Wrinkling his nose in displeasure, Arthur wended his way over to the bar on the left. 

“Water!” he shouted to one of the bartenders through the din of other people pressed around him, also shouting orders. 

The bartender didn’t blink, just pressed a cup of water into his hand. Arthur supposed he could have dreamed it up but better to disturb the dreamscape here as little as possible. 

Arthur found a spot to lean against the wall next to the bar and considered the nightclub he found himself in. Had Eames ever lost _that_ bet, Arthur thought, and pondered what his next move ought to be. Find the manager’s office? Maybe there would be a safe there?

And then he spotted her. Sarah Miller herself. Dressed to go clubbing, in pants such a bright green they practically glowed in the dark and a hot pink cropped top. Arthur tried to refrain from judging the dream outfits of a poor girl who had been driven insane. 

Sarah was dancing with someone, but she kept glancing over at Arthur uneasily. Arthur wasn’t sure this was a good thing—he didn’t want to attract undue attention from a woman who thought two ears was too many—but he also thought that perhaps talking to her would give him a little more insight as to what exactly was going on in this subconscious of hers. 

Finally, Sarah stopped dancing with her partner and wound her way through the crowd to Arthur. She paused in front of him and looked up, and he looked evenly back. 

“Who are you?” she asked fearfully. She looked as if she felt threatened and scared and yet was desperate _not_ to be. 

So Arthur said, “Why don’t we dance?” 

***

Eames ran. Having been spotted by Sarah Miller’s subconscious, he expected projections to start raining down on top of him. And that happened…but every single one of them was Moriarty. 

Eames dodged around some of them, disabled others of them with well-placed kicks and jabs, and shot others point-blank in the face, as they sprang out of the woodwork at him. He directed more shots over his shoulder blindly at the pursuers he could feel. All around him the air vibrated with Moriarty’s laughter, which went on and on and seemed to be coming from every projection at once. 

The door leading to the storage room Eames had entered through loomed in front of him, and he aimed and shot the doorknob clean off rather than risk it being locked when he got to it. He flung himself through the door and slammed it closed, and it wasn’t like that would slow the projections much but it was something. As he fled toward the outer door, he littered the path behind him with everything he could drag down to the floor, and then he dreamed himself up a grenade. He pulled it even as he hit the outer door, and then he tossed it over his shoulder and ran as quickly as he could over the packed earth outside. 

The grenade went off with a far greater explosion than Eames had quite expected, and the concussion of it sent him flying to the ground, which he hit with a hard and ungraceful _oof_ that took him an embarrassing second to recover from. Once he’d got his breath back, he rolled onto his back and propped himself up on his elbows and looked at the theater he’d just run out of. Flames were licking out of the top of it. The grenade hadn’t been that huge, so it was possible that Sarah’s subconscious was somehow destroying itself. Not good, thought Eames, and rolled himself to his feet and then dreamed himself out of his shirt, leaving himself just in the vest he was wearing under it. Because it was too bloody hot to deal with any of this, and he had to get to Arthur and get them both out of here before everything collapsed around them. 

He was going to make the story he told Arthur much more glamorous, of course—not ending with him spitting dust out of his mouth. 

***

“Are you working with him?” asked Sarah Miller, in Arthur’s arms, her eyes cutting all around the dance floor. 

Arthur wasn’t really dancing with her, was barely moving, was concentrating more on how she was behaving. She looked terrified, her voice so low he had to duck his head to catch her words, but she wasn’t terrified of _him_. He was the intruder in her subconscious, but she was clinging to him for dear life. 

“No,” said Arthur honestly. 

Sarah finally looked back at him, still looking wary. “So who are you then?” 

“Let’s just say I’m help,” replied Arthur. 

Sarah shook her head. “There is no help,” she said. “There is no help for me.” 

“That’s not true,” said Arthur, even though it admittedly kind of was. 

“There is no help for me,” continued Sarah desperately. “He’s everywhere. I can’t get away. He—”

“—controls everything,” finished Moriarty, suddenly in Arthur’s arms instead of Sarah. 

Arthur went to take an instinctive step away from him, but Moriarty’s grip on him was iron, pulling him back in with hands that slid possessively to Arthur’s ass, and he said, “Come now, don’t you want to know how I’m doing it?” 

And Arthur did, so he didn’t fight very hard. He let Moriarty lead and thought, _This is only a dream, and in a second you can absolutely dismember him_ , and said, “You’re controlling her subconscious.” 

Moriarty smiled at him. “Of course I am.” 

“But you _are_ her subconscious,” Arthur pointed out. Because he was. Moriarty wasn’t here: This was just Sarah’s projection of him. 

“Oh, yes. I am now. Because I wormed my way in here. She tried to get into my head, and instead I got into hers.” Moriarty’s smile was shark-like, reptilian. “Imagine that: All of the people whose heads you’ve invaded, turning it back on you, becoming the nightmare you can’t escape, stalking through your sleep, with no escape, none. No safe place, just me, everywhere, in every nook and cranny and crevice, every hidden thought, every dark delicious fantasy you think you’re hiding in that depraved brain of yours. I control everything here. Do you know what this is? She met her husband at a nightclub. And do you know what I do? Kill him.” 

From somewhere behind Moriarty, to his right, Arthur saw, out of the corner of his eye, a head explode. Sarah wailed in despair. So did the other patrons of the nightclub, gathering around the scene of the carnage until Arthur and Moriarty were the only two left dancing. Not that Arthur considered this dancing. Mostly he was letting himself be groped in the name of research. 

“A touch over the top, wouldn’t you say?” remarked Arthur evenly. 

Moriarty laughed lightly. “What’s life without a little drama?” he inquired. “I find it adds some panache. Some _bite_.” 

“So she went into your head, but somehow you managed to turn it around and get into hers.”

“I am insidious,” Moriarty purred at him. “I do everything I want here. Again, and again, and again.” Moriarty backed him up, against the wall, hands shifting forward, tight on Arthur’s hips, dark eyes predatory. 

“And that’s enough of that,” said Arthur, and dislocated Moriarty’s shoulder, kicked out his kneecap, and then tipped him to the ground and pressed a shoe over his throat. 

Eames said, “Thank fuck, I’ve killed him enough times today, I didn’t want have to do it again.”

“Lost its luster?” asked Arthur. 

“A bit,” said Eames. 

“Well, I’ve got this covered.” Arthur looked up at Eames and pressed harder on Moriarty’s throat, as Moriarty’s hands clawed at his shoelaces. He lifted his eyebrows at what was Eames was wearing, since he was now down to what Arthur supposed Eames would Britishly call a _vest_. “Every time I see you, you’re wearing something even more atrocious.” 

“Thank you, love, you always know just what to say to make me blush.”

Arthur steadfastly did not let himself ogle Eames’s arms in the vest, the tantalizing lick of tattoos spilling out from underneath the material. The thing Arthur hated most in the world was when Eames wore something that let his tattoos be at all in evidence. “You’ve never blushed in your life,” said Arthur, and pressed even harder on Moriarty’s neck, not at all out of sexual frustration. 

“We have to go. You can finish your sartorial criticisms topside.” 

Arthur stepped off Moriarty’s throat and noticed that they’d attracted the attention of the projections. He fixed his tie and said, “Look, your outfit is attracting stares.” 

Eames closed his hands around Arthur’s waist and drew him in roughly. “It’s because she’s aware of us.” 

“What are you doing?” Arthur asked in alarm, because Eames _could not_ hold him like that. 

“Dancing with you to try to attract less attention.” 

“This is not _dancing_ ,” Arthur bit out, as Eames ground their hips together. 

“Arthur, this is a _nightclub_. We’ll do the foxtrot later, I promise. Anyway, listen to me here: We have to go.” 

Arthur tried to put enough space between him and Eames that he could maintain brain function. “Why? What did you do?”

“Why do you assume _I’ve_ done something?” 

Arthur leaned forward and sniffed Eames’s neck. He smelled…fucking delicious. God, Arthur hated him _so much_. “Because you smell like an explosion.” 

“Did you just smell my neck?” asked Eames faintly when Arthur drew back. 

“Research,” Arthur said self-consciously. Because now Eames was _looking_ at him, really, seriously looking, and for a moment Arthur froze and wondered how much he’d given away, and then the next moment Arthur decided he didn’t really fucking care, because Eames’s eyes were dark and heavy-lidded and _on him_ , and Eames’s hands were on his hips, and they were much too close together, and Arthur put his hands on Eames’s with the intention of pushing them off but just left them there, resting lightly, and stared up at him, waiting for him to say that Arthur was behaving crazily. 

Eames said, his voice soft, “There may have been one tiny grenade involved.” He made it sound like the filthiest thing Arthur had ever heard. He made it sound like, _Get up against that wall or dream yourself a bed, but whichever you choose you have roughly thirty seconds before I rip you out of that suit and fuck you until you don’t remember your own name_. Which would have been a bad idea because, you know, projections, thought Arthur wildly. 

Arthur echoed weakly, “A grenade? _Eames_.” Arthur wanted to say Eames’s name in exasperated disapproval, but he thought he was way off that mark.

“We’re attracting attention again,” said Eames, eyes still locked on Arthur’s. 

“Because we’re not dancing,” said Arthur, and it was true, they had stopped entirely and instead were standing far too much in each other’s personal space, and Arthur didn’t even know how he was going to explain this once they were topside, but he didn’t care. Part of him wanted to pretend that he’d fallen into some weird Moriarty dream influence that would make it totally okay for him to fist his hand into Eames’s shirt and yank it out of the way so he could trace his tongue along the tattoo that started on Eames’s bicep and disappeared onto his cloth-covered chest. 

“Darling,” said Eames, picking up one of his hands from Arthur’s hip to brace against the wall, and when the hell had they ended up with Arthur backed against the wall? Arthur wasn’t sure if the dream was getting fuzzy and disoriented or if that was just how his mind worked when Eames was this close to him. “Sarah Miller’s subconscious is attacking itself,” said Eames seriously, as if it was totally normal to have a discussion while backing your colleague against the wall. 

“Yeah,” Arthur said. “I noticed. It’s hard to miss, with all the Moriartys all over the place.” Arthur paused, and then he smiled, because he wasn’t going to let himself kiss Eames right now but he could smile at him. “But thank you for your condescension.” 

Eames smiled back, his eyes dropping to what Arthur assumed were his dimples. “So therefore, darling, I really think you should shoot me in the face.” 

***

Eames woke mainly aware of the knowledge that he had only just narrowly avoided kissing Arthur because Arthur had _sniffed his bloody neck_ and _who did things like that, seriously_? 

Mycroft drawled, “Ah, everything looks much more tranquil this time.” 

“Tranquil” wasn’t at all how Eames would describe all of his riotous emotions, but he supposed that was all personal and he should really get a grip. 

Arthur woke up, looking as pristine and put-together as he always did, not at all like Eames had just had him pressed against a wall. Arthur said calmly, “That went much better. We learned a lot.” 

And Eames decided that it was entirely for the best that Arthur was going to behave as if nothing odd had happened in that dream. 

Well, _lots_ of odd things had happened in that dream. Maybe Arthur had just decided that Eames grinding his hips up against his didn’t even make the list. 

Eames fought to keep the frown off his face. He didn’t really want Arthur to make a big deal out of it, but he was offended Arthur wasn’t making a big deal of it. Basically, Eames really bloody hated Arthur. 

“Forgive me if I haven’t time to babysit you any longer,” said Mycroft, sounding bored. “But this all took much longer than I had anticipated, and it isn’t wise for me to be away from the office so long.” 

“What with the situation in Beijing,” murmured Sherlock. 

Mycroft frowned at him, then said to Arthur and Eames, “Time to regroup and process what you’ve learned and formulate a new approach.” 

“We should all regroup and process and formulate together,” frowned Sherlock. 

“I promised Lestrade I’d get you to the Yard for that statement,” said John. 

“So?”

“So we’re going.” 

“John, why should I worry about Scotland Yard when—”

“Arthur will fill you in on everything,” John assured him. “Won’t you, Arthur?” 

“I want a _complete report_ ,” insisted Sherlock. 

Eames looked at Arthur, who had just been told not to share anything with Sherlock and so naturally lifted his chin a little bit and said, “Absolutely.” 

“He will pass along his copious notes,” Eames added. 

Mycroft fumed at them and probably tried to threaten them but Eames was no longer registering Mycroftian threats so he didn’t even notice. 

What he did notice was Arthur turning to him, in the black car they’d been ushered into, and saying, “Fuck that.” 

Eames blinked. “…What?” 

“We’re not regrouping and processing and formulating yet. They were fucking unpleasant dreams, and we’re taking a fucking break.” 

Eames knew he looked almost comically astonished by this, but he couldn’t help it. “ _Really_?” 

“Yes.” Arthur was hitting the various buttons on the door. “How the fuck do you get this little window thing down so we can talk to the driver?” 

“Arthur, honestly,” said Eames, leaning over and hitting the right one, “you fixed our telephone this morning.” 

“Yeah, that required skill, not _dumb luck_ ,” sniffed Arthur. 

Eames said to the driver, “Arthur has a request.” 

And then Arthur astonished him further by saying, “The Tate Britain.” 

Eames was very proud of himself for not completely falling off the car seat. 

***

Arthur lived a life where he didn’t often indulge in the things he wanted. Mostly because he thought he’d given himself the ultimate indulgence when he’d walked away from the perfectly respectable life he could have had to do something reckless and stupid but that made him feel so breathlessly alive. Having done that, Arthur didn’t think it was necessary to give in to a lot of other impulses. He did things he liked, of course, bought nice things and lived nice places and ate nice food, but he wasn’t reckless about it, was careful with his money, didn’t necessarily spoil himself. 

But Arthur had had a tough day, damn it. Not that dreamsharing was ever entirely a walk in the park, but usually Arthur had a lot of fun in a challenging dreamscape. Nothing about Sarah Miller’s head had been fun. He had been tortured, had been forced to watch Eames be tortured, had impaled himself on a rake, had been groped by a creepy psychopath, had decidedly not been kissed by Eames, and had really gotten to do precious little destruction to blow off some steam. At least Eames had gotten to throw a grenade. 

And, furthermore, Arthur was supposed to take all of the unpleasant things he’d learned and come up with a plan to subject Eames and himself to an even worse dreamscape with an immense possibility of being trapped in such a terrible headspace indefinitely. So, fuck all of it, he was going on a date with Eames, even if Eames had no idea that was what it was. Because Eames had pressed him up against a wall and unforgivably not kissed him, even if Arthur had gone and done the ridiculously, stupidly obvious thing of sniffing Eames’s neck, and, damn it, if Eames was going to continue to be an absolutely oblivious _bastard_ then Arthur was going to let him, but he was also going to make the prick talk to him a bit about art. 

And Eames did. Eames clearly preferred modern art—and Arthur thought that, of the two of them, no one would ever have pegged Eames as the modern art enthusiast while Arthur preferred Old Masters—but he was knowledgeable about all art. And, indeed, he _loved_ all art, genuinely, even the stuff that wasn’t his preference. He still had respect for it, still glowed in its presence. Arthur marveled at the fact that he’d never been in an art museum with Eames before this job. If he’d known Eames was like this in art museums, he would have dragged him to one in every city they’d ever been in together. 

Or maybe not, Arthur thought, feeling alarmingly buzzed on just the fact of _Eames_. Maybe, in the interest of full professionalism and not making an absolute fool of himself, he should have just avoided all of this at all costs. 

As it was, Arthur didn’t bother to try to resist and just let himself enjoy. He followed Eames from gallery to gallery and let him talk, complaining about some of the art, praising other art, talking about the difficulties of forging this artist or the time someone had stolen another work by that artist. 

“Tell me what you like about Titian,” Eames said eventually. 

Arthur paused in front of a painting of little girls in a garden and paid an undue amount of attention to it, thinking abstractly that Philippa would like it and wondering if they had a print of it in the museum shop that he could send to her. Just in case, of course, he went insane and never saw the kids ever again. 

He shrugged a little bit, hesitant to try to talk to Eames about art when Eames clearly knew _everything_ about art, and said, “I don’t know. It isn’t just Titian. I mean, I said Titian but I like the entire era.” 

“Okay,” Eames agreed easily. “So tell me why.” 

Arthur took a step away from the painting and looked up at it. “What about this one?” he asked, trying to get Eames off the topic. 

Eames glanced at it. “Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose. It’s a famous John Singer Sargent. Not Titian’s era.” 

“I know, but it’s still nice,” said Arthur, now wondering if he was coming across as an idiot about art. Arthur took a deep breath and admitted, hoping it was going to make some sense, “Their vibrancy. That’s what I like. Centuries in between us, but you can look at the paintings and you can understand that we’re not all that different. That they used to dream just like we do. That they used to want to get into those dreams, desperately. But they couldn’t. So they took the world around them and they painted it instead.” 

“So you think all the great Renaissance painters are would-be dreamsharers?” said Eames. 

Arthur smiled at the characterization. “I think it goes the other way: Dreamsharers are would-be great Renaissance painters.”

Eames lifted his eyebrows. “Do you paint, Arthur? Do you have a bespoke smock from Armani?”

Arthur ignored him. “Take you, for instance. You could be a great painter.” 

Eames shook his head. “I just copy others.” 

“Why?”

“Because it’s what I’m good at, Arthur. Hungry?” 

He was changing the subject, and Arthur thought that was fair enough. He felt somewhat bad for pushing into such personal territory. He could only blame his heightened emotion from the disastrous Sarah Miller dreams and the high of Eames in an art museum on top of that. 

“Starving,” said Arthur and followed Eames out of the museum.


	17. Chapter 17

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My beta and I had a huge debate about whether or not Arthur's shirt in this chapter would cost a thousand dollars, which was what I originally had written, and I bowed to her wisdom and changed it to five hundred dollars (although I still think Eames would obnoxiously round way up in the amount that Arthur would be spending on clothes), but in doing our research over this, we make the following observations: 
> 
> (1) We bet Kanye West would have a thousand-dollar shirt, and now I want the fic where Arthur is friends with Kanye West. 
> 
> (2) Maybe Arthur's shirt is made of dodo skin. You don't know, okay? IT COULD BE. YOU DON'T KNOW. 
> 
> (3) There's a website that says this: "Looking to blow some really big money on a nice suit? It's not as easy as you might think! For obvious reasons, most designers and tailors try to keep their prices relatively earthbound because they know the market for suits with sky-high prices is extremely small." My beta: "That market is Kanye West and Arthur in fanfiction." 
> 
> (4) Probably you need the really expensive suit to fit your enormous penis.
> 
> (Continued in the end note because I got cut off here for some reason.)

Chapter 17

The thing about Arthur was that he was everything all at once. Eames had not always thought that about him. As a young forger, on the first job in Rio, he had overestimated Arthur’s age and underestimated his sense of fun. He’d been an idiot on that job. He was a smarter forger by the time the Moscow job had rolled around, better at everything, and that time through he realized that Arthur was both younger than he should have been and also older than he should have been, that Arthur was all-work-and-no-play but covered a reluctant and delightfully sly sense of humor that Eames could coax out if he worked hard enough. Arthur didn’t trust you—to a relentless degree, questioning everything you did—until the moment when he put his life in your hands without blinking. Arthur planned everything down to each tiny, meticulous detail, and Arthur improvised with breathless brilliance. Arthur was _everything_. 

So Arthur drank coffee but craved hot chocolate. Arthur wore traditional suits but with playful color combinations and creative patterns. Or else he wore contemporary cut suits in the most traditional gray tweed. He liked sleek, modern architecture, and he loved Paris, and he adored Renaissance art. He sniffed Eames’s neck and let Eames back him against a wall, and he also acted like absolutely nothing had happened afterwards. And he liked expensive wine, but he appreciated a good greasy dive. 

So Eames took Arthur to a fish-and-chip shop that smelled as if it hadn’t been cleaned since the Blitz and delighted when Arthur didn’t blink, when Arthur merely rolled up the sleeves of his five-hundred-dollar shirt and said, deadpan, “What’s good here?”

Eames grinned and then Pete behind the counter said, “Kingsley, as I live and breathe!”

“Hello, Pete,” Eames responded pleasantly. “My friend here is looking for the best fish and chips in London.” 

“Then you’d best take him somewhere else!” exclaimed Pete, and laughed heartily at his own joke. “Have a seat, I’ll bring them over to you.” 

Eames led Arthur over to a barely-holding-it-together chair, and Arthur lifted his eyebrows at him. 

“Not my real name,” Eames told him, as he sat. 

“I know,” said Arthur. “ _Kingsley_? You realize I could have a psychological field day with that?” 

“Bugger off,” said Eames good-naturedly, “I didn’t choose it.” 

“Then how’d you get it?” 

“For my unparalleled ability to imitate the poshest of accents. Hence, _like a king_ ,” answered Eames, showing off smugly. 

Arthur looked amused enough that shadows of dimples were lurking in his cheeks. “You would take me to the one place in London that considers you royalty.” 

“Now, now, remember, to the Tate Modern I’m a viscount.”

Arthur made a skeptical sound and said, “So tell me about this place.” 

“This is where I learned how to gamble,” Eames announced grandly. 

“Oh, dear God,” said Arthur. “Is this what we have to blame for your terrible card-playing abilities?” 

“They only _seem_ terrible. I’ll have you know it’s all an act.” 

“Best forge you’ve ever pulled off,” Arthur informed him drily, and Eames laughed because he couldn’t help it, for as much as he hated Arthur, he also just _really loved Arthur_. 

Pete dropped two orders of fish and chips onto their table with no ceremony and said, “So how’s business, Kings?”

“Comes and goes,” responded Eames noncommittally. 

“Got yourself a corporate mark, do you?” asked Pete, glancing at Arthur’s suit. 

“Just a job with a dress code,” said Eames, with a flash of white teeth that said _Stop asking questions_. 

Pete did, although Eames thought the death glare Arthur was shooting him had a lot to do with that. With an offended sniff, Pete went back behind the counter. 

Eames said, “Here. Vinegar on your chips, and stop looking at my old mentor as if you’re going to cut his jugular with a plastic knife.” 

“He’s nosey,” said Arthur. 

“He’s _friendly_ ,” Eames corrected. 

“This is why I don’t tell people what I do,” Arthur informed him, and took a huge bite of fish. 

“It’s easier to just pretend to be a chef?”

Arthur gave him a look that said, _Of course, you idiot_. 

“Is there anyone who knows what you do?” 

“You,” Arthur said, brandishing a chip before stuffing it in his mouth. 

Eames considered that. He didn’t have anyone who he thought would really miss him, but he did have a lot of people who knew a lot about him. For a person who spent his life pretending to be someone else, Eames thought there were quite a lot of people who harbored no illusions about the quality of life he led. 

Which was possibly why no one would really miss him if he disappeared. 

“So where did Eames come from?” Arthur asked, swallowing.

Eames looked at him blankly. 

“As an alias,” Arthur clarified. 

“Me,” Eames said gruffly, because he didn’t want to get into _that_. “So now that you have gorged yourself on art and fried foods, let’s go over what we learned today.” 

Arthur allowed the subject change, still steadily shoveling food into his mouth. “What was in your warehouse?” 

“Headless dolls, of course. And don’t think you’re getting out of buying me all the vodka in the world.” 

Arthur gave him a look, then turned his attention back to his fish and chips. 

Eames said, “It was a theater. Sarah Miller was dressed as a ballerina. Moriarty was making her spin on the stage.” 

“Ballet,” said Arthur reflectively, tipping his chair back. Eames watched the back legs creak worryingly on their fifty years of hard living. “She was a ballerina, before she joined MI-6. She had a late growth spurt and never quite regained her dancer’s sense of balance, so she never really excelled as much as she did before that. She eventually gave up the dream of dancing professionally.” 

Eames stared at him, holding a bite of fish halfway to his mouth. It plopped off the cheap plastic fork. 

Arthur said wryly, “Eames, if you’re not careful, you’ll get grease on that beautiful shirt and never be able to wear it again, and how would any of us cope with that tragedy?” 

Eames ignored him. He retrieved the bite of fish and said, “How do you know all that?”

Arthur sighed, long-suffering. “Because I read the fucking file, Eames, because I’m a fucking professional and it’s my fucking job.” 

“Well,” Eames said, a bit stung, “I forged Moriarty after only looking at him for a few minutes, so…you know.” 

“That was the stupidest idea you’ve ever had,” Arthur snapped at him. 

“Got her away from you, didn’t it?” 

“And then she pulled your eyeball out of your head.” 

“Sorry you had to witness that, but trust me, petal, it was worse from my perspective.” Eames paused. “No pun intended. Was that even a pun?” 

Arthur wasn’t paying attention to him. Arthur, still tipped precariously back on his chair, had his notebook out and was scribbling in it, his fish and chips forgotten. 

“Arthur, love, finish your food,” Eames said, annoyed with himself for having distracted Arthur too soon. 

“In a bit,” Arthur replied, clearly not paying attention to him. “They were both special memories to her. The most special memories. That’s what she was warehousing.” 

“Sarah Miller cherishes ballet and nightclubs. I may have just missed out on meeting my soul mate.”

“It was where she met her husband.”

“What?”

“The nightclub: it was where she met her husband. She was trying to protect the memory. She wiped her entire subconscious clean—destroyed it—made it a desolation—except for her two most precious memories. She couldn’t bear to get rid of them.” 

“And Moriarty colonized them. But this girl is trained, Arthur. She knows what to do in a dream.”

“She can’t push him out.” 

“Why not?”

“Because he got in. She was supposed to get into his brain, and he got into hers instead. He said it to me: like every mark I’d ever targeted suddenly showing up inside of me.”

“Arthur, if that happened, you’d wake yourself up.” 

Arthur looked at him. “And stay awake forever? John Watson’s right: some people don’t want to dream.” 

Eames considered. “So what you’re saying is he basically inceptioned himself into her head? Just like that?” Eames snapped his fingers. “We bloody almost killed ourselves getting an inception done, and he does it first try? What the bloody hell, Arthur? We should have got Moriarty on the inception job.”

“Yes, what that job definitely needed was more loose cannons,” drawled Arthur, tapping his pen against his notebook, chair still tilted backward. 

“Can you…not do that with that chair?” Eames asked. 

Arthur looked surprised. “What?”

Eames felt like an idiot. “The legs are going to snap.” 

Arthur lifted his eyebrows, and Eames knew he was mother-henning to a ridiculous degree, but he put his chair back on level ground. “I thought you welcomed the opportunity to watch me lose my balance and go sprawling.” 

“Not when I haven’t caused it,” said Eames lightly. 

“So he’s getting into their heads. He’s destroying everything that they cherish about themselves. He leaves them a wasteland in his wake.” Arthur looked out the window at the growing darkness. “How?” 

***

Arthur, back at the hotel suite, babbled on about how maybe they ought to go into an earlier victim’s brain, about how maybe Moriarty wouldn’t have perfected his attack then, or maybe they ought to stop by Baker Street and tell Sherlock what they knew and see what insights he had. Arthur checked his email, still speculating out loud about what they ought to do next, and then said, “Yusuf says there are no scholarly studies about dreamsharing drugs. Doesn’t that seem like an oversight?” 

“On the part of criminals who are constantly switching residences and identities? Dreadful oversight that we haven’t developed respectable scholarship. I was just lamenting the other day how we’ve no endowed library.”

“Just because we’re criminals doesn’t mean we can’t be _professional_ ,” Arthur sniffed. 

“The government probably has studies,” Eames said, studying their minibar critically. 

“Good point,” Arthur allowed. “I’ll make a note of the second time you’ve made a good point in our acquaintance.” 

“Did you email Yusuf?” Eames asked, kneeling by the minibar and beginning to pick its lock expertly. 

“Best chemist I know.” 

“I thought you didn’t trust him.” 

“I’m not going under with him, I’m just asking him a question.”

“Well, speaking of people you keep in touch with,” Eames remarked, as the door opened for him. 

There was a moment of silence. Eames listened hard to it. Arthur said, “Is this going to be about Cobb?” 

“You text him weekly?” Eames said, and retrieved the bottle of vodka. 

“We’re friends,” Arthur said shortly. 

“Christ, your definition of friend is so alarming,” mocked Eames, and grabbed two glasses for them. 

Arthur said, after a moment, “There’s a lot of— It doesn’t matter. I don’t have to justify it to you.” 

“No, you don’t,” Eames agreed evenly, carrying the vodka over to the coffee table and sitting on the opposite couch. “But you should email him. He’s been around, a lot, and if anyone will have heard of the situation we’re dealing with here, it will be him.” 

“I didn’t really want to get him involved. He’s got kids and…” 

Eames poured the vodka. “I don’t disagree, but it’s an email, and you got Yusuf involved and he’s got a kid on the way. I’m all for anything that keeps us from ending up like crazy Sarah Miller. I rather like my dreams, thanks very much.” Eames handed Arthur a tumbler of vodka. 

“What’s this?” Arthur asked, even as he accepted it. 

“It’s vodka, darling. It’s a colorless, odorless alcohol commonly associated with Russia—”

“Did you steal this from the minibar?” 

“Of course I did.” 

“You were supposed to _buy_ us vodka. That was the bet.”

“I’d rather make Mycroft Holmes buy us the vodka.”

“It’s really the British taxpayers.”

“Good thing I don’t pay taxes here,” rejoined Eames. 

“Do you pay taxes anywhere?” 

“I pay taxes in many places under many identities on all of my casino winnings.” 

“From cheating.” 

“At least I pay the taxes on all of it.”

Arthur shook his head a bit, lifted his vodka glass, and said, “To your health,” in flawless Russian. 

And that was how it started. 

How it ended was with the minibar decimated, the two of them on the floor leaning back against their opposite couches, and Arthur slurring, “Never have I ever dog-sat for a neighbor.” 

Eames knocked back his tequila and said, “ _Seriously_ , darling? _Dog-sitting_?” 

“She’s a nice, little, old lady,” Arthur said, in his defense. 

“Who lives next door to a psychopath.” 

“Hey.” Arthur pointed with his glass. “I take offense to that characterization of me.”

“Noted. You’re nothing at all like a psychopath. You’re just a…frighteningly capable criminal.” 

“I don’t just murder people,” Arthur said, sounding genuinely offended. “I don’t just…murder people. Never have I ever killed someone who didn’t deserve it.” Arthur knocked back his tequila. 

Eames refrained from pointing out that that’s what a murderer would say. He refilled both of their glasses. “Never have I ever sent out Christmas cards,” he said. 

Arthur didn’t drink. He regarded Eames. 

Eames said, “Aren’t you going to ask me who I send Christmas cards to?”

“I fucking hate killing people,” Arthur said. “I really do, Eames. I _hate_ it.” 

Arthur’s hair was in his face, and his tie had been abandoned, and his waistcoat was unbuttoned, and he looked drawn and anguished and fretful, and Eames said honestly, feeling for him, “I know you do, love.” 

“No, I _do_ ,” Arthur insisted, as if Eames had just been humoring him. 

“I know,” Eames agreed again, but Arthur talked over him. 

“I just…don’t know why…” Arthur tipped his head back against the couch. “Why does everyone hate me?”

Eames stared at him. “Who hates you?”

“ _Everyone_. That’s why I have to kill people, because people are always trying to kill me, and I don’t get why. I try to be…” Arthur shifted his head on the couch so he could look at Eames. “Aren’t I _fair_?”

“You’re incredibly fair,” Eames told him gently, trying to pretend like he wasn’t experiencing all manner of irrational heartache here. “And that’s why people hate you.” 

“I’ve never learned the trick,” Arthur said. “I wish you could teach me it. You make me so fucking jealous; I can’t stand you.” 

“What trick?” Eames asked blankly. 

“The trick of making people like you. I don’t know that trick.”

Eames looked at him for a moment and thought of all the words he longed to say but felt so permanently incapable of saying, so damn _frozen_ in the face of how much he meant it, more than he’d ever meant anything in his life. Eames didn’t know how to say things that _meant_ something, he only knew how to play the role. And Eames wanted to take Arthur and bundle him up and tell him that it didn’t matter, he liked him enough for all the people in the world, and this was _Arthur_ , Arthur who would have been like trying to bundle up a snarling, rabid tiger. 

Eames swallowed and said, “Okay. I think we’ve had enough,” and meant so much by that as he carefully took Arthur’s glass out of his hand. 

“We didn’t finish the game,” Arthur protested. 

“Yes, we did.” Eames stood and pulled Arthur up to standing. 

“I was going to beat you,” said Arthur blurrily. 

“You did,” Eames assured him, pulling him toward the bedroom. 

“I didn’t,” Arthur complained. “I never do. I never… You always… Fuck you,” Arthur finished, and Eames nudged him easily backward onto the bed. 

“Yes,” Eames agreed, pulling his shoes off. “That’s usually what it comes to between us, isn’t it?”

“But I don’t want it to,” Arthur said, sounding frustrated. “I don’t know why I…I just hate you so much sometimes.” 

“That feeling is entirely mutual, love,” Eames remarked drily and leaned over him. “Listen to me. You’ve got to sleep this off, and you’re going to feel better about everything in the morning, yeah?”

“Did you get me drunk?” Arthur accused, with a flash of anger that was a shadow of what it would normally be. 

“Not intentionally, but I don’t expect you to believe that. Go to sleep, love.” 

“I’m sorry,” Arthur said suddenly. 

“For what?” Eames asked, honestly perplexed. 

“For being terrible to you.” 

“You’re really not, darling. Stop talking now.” 

“I am. You try to be so nice. You try to make me laugh. You call me ‘darling.’ You’re going to steal me a Titian.”

Eames stared down at Arthur, whose eyes were drifting closed, and he felt hot and cold and fully unable to breathe. Once, in a museum where he’d been stealing something, the guard had walked by unscheduled, and Eames had frozen into a dark corner, and this felt alarmingly like that. Eames said what he thought he shouldn’t say. He leaned down and said, “Arthur, I’m going to tell you a very important secret, only because you’re never going to remember any of this in the morning.” 

Arthur made a soft, inquisitive noise that made Eames squeeze his eyes shut against the temptation to fall into bed with Arthur and kiss the words right into his mouth. “I think you’re delightful, and I like you quite a lot.” 

Arthur’s eyes opened, focusing in lopsided drunkenness on Eames, and he grinned, wide and sloppy, full of dimples, and Eames thought he’d say it a million more times if it would provoke Arthur grinning at him like that. “I like you, too,” he said. “You’re nice.” Eames was decidedly not nice. Eames was the opposite of nice. Eames had no idea what to make of Arthur, _of all people_ , thinking he was _nice_. And then Arthur closed his eyes and started snoring. 

“Oh, darling,” Eames sighed. “You’re such a puzzle wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a conundrum wrapped in a very expensive, very attractive suit.” And then, figuring he’d never again get the opportunity, brushed Arthur’s tumbled curls back and kissed his forehead. 

***

Arthur woke feeling like a truck had hit him. His totem came up four, twice, so apparently this was reality. Fuck reality, thought Arthur, and took the aspirin he found on the nightstand. Then he dragged himself out of the bed and into the living area, where he found Eames snoring loudly on a couch while surrounded by empty liquor bottles. And the thing about that was that it was entirely, incredibly revolting and yet Arthur wanted to crawl onto Eames’s fucking chest and go back to sleep on him, just for a little while. 

Arthur took a shower instead. Well, he turned the shower on and then he crawled into the tub and curled into a ball and tried to think. Vodka, he thought. And then bourbon. And then tequila. And maybe rum. Oh, Christ, had there been rum, too? He was going to fucking kill Eames. He had no memory of how he’d gotten to bed, only the very foggiest memory of the tequila bottle being opened and then it all being a lost cause after that. Eames had apparently been smoking him in Never Have I Ever, because how else had Eames had enough wherewithal to open more alcohol? And whose fucking idea had it been to play a drinking game anyway? Like they were in fucking college? 

“Fuck,” said Arthur, out loud, recalling that it had been his idea, and then he decided that he wanted to just stay in the shower for a thousand years. 

He did something that resembled combing his hair, and then he contemplated his clothing, couldn’t handle dealing with any of it, and instead stole a pair of Eames’s sweatpants, topping it with one of his own plain white undershirts. The sweatpants were hopelessly too big, but he didn’t care because it was definitely that kind of fucking day. 

Eames was awake when Arthur trailed into the living area, flipping steadily through the channels on their television. 

“I hate you,” Arthur informed him, “with the magnitude of at least a thousand suns.”

“ _Arthur_ ,” said Eames, and his voice sounded positively _chocolate_ with glee. “What are you _wearing_?” 

“Shut,” Arthur told him, curling onto the empty couch, “up.” 

“This is the best day of my entire life,” Eames said reverently. 

“I am going to shoot you so many times when I get my gun back,” Arthur told him, closing his eyes. “I am just going to pump bullets into your lifeless body.” 

Eames was silent in an odd way Arthur didn’t like. 

He opened his eyes again and looked at him. “What?” 

“I’d never try to kill you,” Eames blurted out suddenly. 

Arthur blinked, surprised. “What?” 

“You know that, right? I mean, fuck all the rest of it, all of the other complications we keep adding to— I’d never try to kill you. I’m not one of those people you need to watch out for, Arthur.” 

“Okay,” Arthur said, bewildered, because he’d always thought himself pretty confident of that. “I don’t… Okay.”

Eames nodded, as if satisfied, and turned back to the television. 

Arthur wondered what odd exchange they’d just had and if he should close the circle. “And you know I’m not… _serious_ when I say I’m going to shoot you.” 

“Not outside of a dream,” Eames said, with a faint smile. 

Arthur felt relieved to be back on more normal ground for them. “You frequently deserve it in a dream.” 

“So what shall we do today, pet?” asked Eames. 

“We’re going to Baker Street to consult with our chemist,” said Arthur. 

“Are you going in my sweatpants?” inquired Eames, with delight. 

“Of course not. I’m going to get up and get properly dressed.”

“Any minute now,” said Eames, with gentle mockery. 

“Shut up,” Arthur told him again. Not exactly his most sparkling repartee but he couldn’t help it. “You cheated at Never Have I Ever.” 

“No, I didn’t.”

“‘Never have I ever forged a ten-year-old girl.’ Seriously, Eames?”

“Well, _you_ did ‘Never have I ever paid more than ten dollars for a shirt.’”

“How was I supposed to know you’d never spent more than ten dollars on a shirt?” protested Arthur. 

“You see my shirts! You’re constantly complaining about my shirts!”

“I don’t understand why you’re so fucking cheap when you could make yourself all the counterfeit money in the world to buy _nice_ shirts.” 

“It’s not about the expense, Arthur, it’s about the thrill of the hunt. Finding the bargain.” 

“Those shirts are not a bargain for those of us who have to look at them on you all the time.” 

“If I walked around shirtless all the time, you’d be too distracted, love.” 

Because that was true, Arthur changed the subject. “We weren’t even playing the game right,” Arthur informed him. “I think you’re supposed to drink if you _have_ done it, not if you’ve _never_ done it.” 

There was a moment of silence. “If you _have_ done the thing that the other person has _never_ done?” Eames asked, to clarify. 

Arthur honestly couldn’t fucking remember. “Tell me about this stupid Korean drama you’re watching,” he said, to change the subject. 

“Oh, darling, I thought you’d never ask!” exclaimed Eames.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (5) According to the Internet, most people who buy really expensive suits are princes and Russian oligarchs. My beta: "And Arthur from Inception in fic."
> 
> (6) And I really want the fic where Eames tries to buy a suit at the prices he thinks Arthur pays for suits and he stalks princes and Russian oligarchs to see where they buy suits.
> 
> (7) Tom Ford calls his really expensive suits "statements."
> 
> (8) There is a t-shirt that reads "This t-shirt cost a thousand dollars," and I feel like Eames should buy that for Arthur.
> 
> (9) Vicuna fabric is considered very luxurious and comes from a type of llama in South America. Now I want the fic where Eames buys a vicuna farm for Arthur's suit.
> 
> (10) We decided most likely Arthur would pay $5,000 for a suit, which renders the thousand-dollar shirt unrealistic. (But the five-hundred-dollar shirt remains less pithy in the narrative.)
> 
> (And this is why normally my beta and I are not in the same place when I post. Normally we have to be separated into entirely different states. Preferably different time zones, if we can manage it.)


	18. Chapter 18

Chapter 18

John was used to Sherlock staying up all night, used to Sherlock getting fixated on something that intrigued him and foregoing all usual human occupations—eating, sleeping, John would not have been surprised if Sherlock even tried to forget _breathing_ —in order to focus more fully on his preoccupation. John was even used to it happening when Moriarty was involved. 

But he hated it when Moriarty was involved. 

Normally, John just settled into the different rhythm of the flat when Sherlock was in this sort of mood, as opposed to when he was sulking about how the world was the most boring place. But Sherlock’s all-night violin playing filled him with dread. They lived lives where they were almost killed more than other people, but still John knew that Moriarty was their one true threat. And John didn’t count him out just because he happened to be currently locked up in a government prison somewhere. After all, wasn’t he insinuating himself just as much into Sherlock’s mind? And whatever he’d done to Sarah Miller had been unpleasant, so unpleasant that it had made Arthur and Eames pale and worried-looking, and John hadn’t quite made up his mind about those two yet, but he knew they were not thin-skinned, nervous types. 

John spent a sleepless night contemplating the existence of dreamsharing and all the things that could go wrong in a person’s brain, and listening to Sherlock’s absent-minded violin, not even playing a tune so much as individual plaintive notes. Then when it was morning he went downstairs and made them tea. He brought a cup out to Sherlock and put it on the desk for him where he was playing by the window. Then he sat in his chair and inquired pleasantly, “Do you think you’re going to sleep anytime soon?”

“ _You_ didn’t sleep,” Sherlock shot back, without even turning to look at him. 

“You played the violin all night,” John pointed out. 

“Which doesn’t usually bother you,” Sherlock retorted. 

John glanced toward the kitchen and said, “Why were you playing all night? I thought you’d be fiddling with the compound.” 

“I can’t until I know what happened in Sarah Miller’s dream, because I didn’t get to go into Sarah Miller’s dream.” 

“It’s a person’s head, you know. Her innermost thoughts. It isn’t a theme park you’ve been denied admittance to.” 

Sherlock waved his hand about and tossed himself petulantly into his chair. John knew he was thinking, once again, that John always made the obvious mistake of thinking so much about people’s _personhood_. “I don’t know why you’re so worried about all of this. Clearly people have been doing this for ages.” 

“Yeah, and sometimes they end up like Sarah Miller, and how would you like that?” 

“I wouldn’t end up like Sarah Miller.” 

“Of course not, because you’re the great and clever Sherlock Holmes whose life I have to regularly save because of how stupidly you rush into danger.” 

“I do that because you like to rush in and play the hero,” Sherlock sniffed. 

John didn’t even dignify that with a reply. He lifted his eyebrows and sipped his tea. 

Sherlock picked up his mobile and scrolled through it, then sighed and tossed it aside. “Arthur is ignoring my emails.” 

“I like Arthur more and more,” John remarked. 

Sherlock gave him a dark look. “Don’t you have a _date_ you could go on?” asked Sherlock scathingly. 

“It’s nine o’clock in the morning,” said John. 

Sherlock gave him a look that said _So?_ Clearly not understanding John’s point. 

John sighed and went into the kitchen and made them breakfast. Sherlock of course ignored the breakfast in favor of playing sulkily on his violin. John went to the shops to replenish their food supply and came back to Sherlock in the middle of a monologue on something—alarmingly, from what little John heard, it seemed like the topic might have been phallic symbols. John said, “I’ve missed this whole thing because I was out,” and Sherlock then sulked about John’s audacity in leaving the flat. John worked on his blog, and Sherlock stared at him unnervingly and made snappish comments about John’s typing abilities. All in all, it was a miserable day and John almost rang Mycroft to tell him to get his dreamsharing criminals to Baker Street so that this entire bloody thing with Moriarty could just be got over with. 

And then their doorbell buzzed and Sherlock practically bounded joyously out of his seat and down the stairs. John sighed and put his laptop aside and listened to Mrs. Hudson being very confused over Sherlock’s sudden enthusiasm for opening doors, and introductions were made, and Mrs. Hudson tittered in response to something that probably Eames had said, John thought, and then Sherlock led them into the room. 

“Hello,” John said pleasantly. “Nice to see you.” He actually really meant it. 

Arthur said drily, “I thought maybe we should come in response to one of the eighteen emails I’ve received so far.”

“You’re terrible at responding to email,” Sherlock snapped at him. “What sort of businessman are you?” 

“Not a businessman,” said Arthur, already stripping himself out of his coat. He looked a bit worse for wear, John thought, as if he’d had a tough night. There was no dead giveaway, he was perfectly pulled together as usual, but there was a general feeling of fragility to him, like it was all taking more effort than usual. John thought if he’d asked Sherlock, Sherlock would have been able to point to a million concrete details about Arthur that were giving him away, but John was just left with the general impression. 

“Arthur’s a chef, don’t you know?” yawned Eames, and Eames hadn’t made any effort to look anything other than a rough-edged mess. 

John lifted his eyebrows and wondered if this had been provoked by Sarah Miller’s dreams. How bad had they been, anyway? 

Arthur rolled up his sleeves and sat at the desk and took out his notebook and said, “Let’s work.” 

“ _Finally_ ,” said Sherlock. “Tell me about what happened in Sarah Miller’s head.” 

“The first time she had me tackled to the ground and was trying to twist my finger off,” said Arthur dispassionately. 

Eames winced, and John didn’t think it was a headache. He looked at John and said hopefully, “Any chance of a cup of coffee?” 

John took pity on him, even though he probably shouldn’t, because it wasn’t like Eames had been _forced_ to over-indulge the night before. But he said, “Yeah,” and led Eames into the kitchen. 

Their coffee wasn’t fancy because they both much preferred tea, and John sensed that Eames didn’t quite approve but also that Eames didn’t really care at that point. While John got the pot ready, Eames very comfortably retrieved two mugs, as if this were his kitchen. He said, “Will you and Sherlock have coffee?”

“We’ve already had tea,” John said. 

“How extraordinarily civilized of you,” remarked Eames, and, yawning, leaned against the kitchen counter, crossing both his arms and his ankles. And then he looked at John critically, suddenly more sharp-eyed than John would have supposed him capable of at the moment, and John wondered if Eames was over-exaggerating his state while Arthur was under-exaggerating his. “Arthur’s good at what he does, you know.” 

“I don’t even know what he does,” John said, with a tight smile, because he didn’t want to have this conversation with him. 

“I’m just saying that he won’t let Sherlock get into trouble. Arthur doesn’t let _me_ get into trouble on a job. And that takes some doing. So I know you’re worried, and it does seem like Sherlock and Moriarty have a bit of a complicated history—” John snorted “—but Arthur won’t put him in danger. It’s a tricky job, and he needs the help right now, but that’s all this is; it’s perfectly safe.”

“Perfectly safe?” John echoed. 

“Yes.” Eames glanced at the coffee pot, which had finished its gurgling and was now ready to be poured, and talked as he poured the coffee. “To be totally honest, if he thought he could get away with it, I think Arthur would try to keep _me_ out of Moriarty’s head for this job, so he’s definitely not going to let Sherlock into it.” 

John watched Eames add sugar to one cup of coffee and retrieve milk from their fridge to add to it. He didn’t even blink at the various body parts in there. Then Eames set the cup aside and took a sip from the black cup. Arthur’s coffee, John thought. Eames had just expertly made Arthur a cup of coffee, and John knew the amount of time you had to spend with a person to get their milk and sugar down to the casual science Eames had just displayed. 

“Do the two of you always work together?” John asked. 

“Often enough,” said Eames. “It depends on the job.”

“You seem to work together well,” remarked John, still fishing. 

Eames said, “We either work together very well or we’re at each other’s throats. Makes it entertaining.” He flashed John a smile. “Much, I gather from your blog, like you and Sherlock.” And Eames winked and walked out of the kitchen with the coffee. 

John followed behind him as he handed Arthur the coffee and settled against the window. Arthur took the coffee without comment, sipped it, and said, “Sherlock has a crazy idea.”

“It’s the only idea that will work,” said Sherlock sulkily from his chair. 

Eames lifted his eyebrows. “And this idea is?”

“He thinks he can do Moriarty’s trick.” 

“Moriarty’s trick?” echoed Eames. 

“The inception trick,” said Arthur. 

“Ah, I see, when you said he was a natural, you meant he was a bloody savant, did you?” Eames’s tone was desert dry. 

“Sherlock has a good point. We’re thinking about a different kind of inception, you and I. You always say inception doesn’t work unless the mark gives himself the idea.” 

“It’s true. It doesn’t.” 

“Moriarty isn’t planting an idea,” Sherlock burst in, clearly having listened to other people’s voices for too long, and, frankly, John was impressed he’d lasted as long as he had. “Moriarty is using the ideas he finds there. He’s taking the ideas you already had and using them against you.” 

“Moriarty’s extracting,” Arthur said to Eames, “only instead of taking the idea with him, he’s leaving it in the middle of your head for you to deal with.” 

“And that’s enough to drive someone insane?” Eames sounded skeptical. 

“The right idea, in the right place. Like watching your husband die over and over and over on the night you met him. If that was all you saw, when you closed your eyes…” Arthur trailed off. 

“That doesn’t even seem clever,” said Eames. “Anybody could do that. We could do that whenever we wanted.” 

“Then why don’t you?” asked Sherlock. 

“Probably because we’re not psychopaths,” Eames snapped at him. 

“We don’t deal with a subconscious that way,” Arthur said. “We try to control the subconscious all the time. We’re after very specific stuff. I don’t know that we would know how to let the subconscious just spin out like that. We work very hard to make sure that _doesn’t_ happen.” 

“Okay. So how do we learn how to do it? Or, I guess, more importantly, how to keep Moriarty from doing it to us.” 

“That’s Sherlock’s crazy idea. He wants to do it to us so we can see what it’s like and practice resisting it.” 

“No,” John said immediately. “No, no, no. Go into a dream again? You? Absolutely not.” 

“It’s the only way, John,” said Sherlock. 

“We do need to understand better what Moriarty is doing if we’re going to combat it,” Arthur told him.

“This plan lacks a certain _je ne sais quoi_ that I usually associate with a plan of yours, darling. Oh, wait. I _do sais ce que c’est_ ,” said Eames. “What’s missing is your usual unquenchable thirst for _common sense_ , and _specificity_ , and _lack of suicidalness_.” 

“I agree with Eames,” said John. 

“I like him better than I like you,” Eames told Arthur. 

“That’s tragic for me. I’m sure you can imagine how bereft I feel now,” deadpanned Arthur. 

“I can, yes, although normally I’m used to at least some rending of garments upon being told something like that.” 

“My garments are too nice to rend, though,” Arthur pointed out. 

“Can we get back to the point?” John interrupted impatiently. “Which is that I don’t want you going in any more dreams.” 

“John, I know that you’ve known for a while that I was going to have to spend time in dreams to help them,” Sherlock snapped. “You’re not an _idiot_.” 

“You’ve certainly changed your tune,” retorted John, glaring at Arthur. 

“It isn’t Moriarty’s head,” Arthur inserted calmly. “I wouldn’t let him in there. And do you have a better idea?” Arthur looked at Eames. “Either of you?” 

“I have so many fantastic ideas, petal, but usually you’re not interested in hearing them. For instance, I have _really, really_ good ideas about your ties—”

“Ideas about Moriarty,” Arthur clarified. 

Eames paused. “Ah, well, you didn’t _specify_ before. No, I have no better ideas about Moriarty, but I’m not exactly wild about the plan of ‘let’s let an amateur poke around my head a bit in an effort to almost but hopefully not quite drive me insane.’”

“Amateur?!” sputtered Sherlock. 

“Not your head,” Arthur said. 

Eames blinked at him. “What?” 

“Not your head. My head.” 

Eames carefully put his mug down on the desk and said evenly, “Can I clarify, pet? Just to make sure I have everything right. You know how long it takes me to catch on to things sometimes. Your plan is to let a man, on his second time in a dreamscape, attempt to drive you insane, leaving yourself totally defenseless, vulnerable, open to harm, with absolutely no backup?” 

“Eames—” Arthur began. 

“ _Butterflies_ ,” said Eames. “And the fact that I have had to use that code word _twice_ in this job is distressing.” 

“It is such a fucking terrible code word, Eames,” Arthur complained. 

“ _Butterflies_ ,” said Eames again, and straightened from the window. “Come along.” 

Arthur lifted his eyebrows. “‘Come along’?” echoed Arthur. 

“If you don’t come, I will make you come,” said Eames. 

“And then I’ll throw you out that window,” replied Arthur. 

“And I feel like that would be unfortunate for me.” 

“I feel that way, too,” bit out Arthur. 

“Then, given your fondness for me, you should just come along, shouldn’t you?” 

Arthur glared at Eames for a long moment, then he turned to Sherlock and John and said graciously, as if they hadn’t just witnessed all of that, “We’ll be right back.”

John watched them go, then turned to Sherlock and said, “What are you going to do to him?” 

“Show him what he’s up against and thereby save his life,” retorted Sherlock. “And I thought that was what you loved so much: the saving of lives.” 

John, recognizing that, as usual, Sherlock had out-argued him, went back into the kitchen to make more tea. 

***

Arthur said, as soon as they stepped outside, “It is such a _fucking terrible_ code word and I am changing it, okay?” 

“To what?” Eames asked. 

“Something _normal_. Like, I don’t know, ‘outside.’” 

“You want the code word for ‘let’s talk outside’ to be ‘outside’?” 

“It would make sense.” 

“It’s a bit obvious, don’t you think?” 

“Like suddenly blurting out ‘butterflies’ isn’t obvious? I don’t understand where that even came from.”

“It’s called imagination, Arthur. And shut up about the bloody fucking code words for two bloody minutes, would you?” 

Arthur looked closely at his watch. “Fine. Two minutes. Go.” 

“This is a terrible plan. Remember when my plan was to forge Moriarty and you said it was a terrible plan? This is so much worse than my plan.”

“You didn’t run your terrible plan by me,” Arthur snapped. “So there can’t be a comparison between the two. At least I _told_ you I was planning this.” 

“You’ve interrupted my two minutes of time,” Eames told him harshly. “You’re not doing this. I’m not letting you do this.”

“Eames, there is no other way to— We can’t have the first time we deal with this be in Moriarty’s head.” 

“He has no idea what he’s doing in a dreamscape.” 

“Neither does Moriarty.”

“That’s clearly not true. Moriarty clearly knows exactly what he’s doing in a dreamscape.”

“Only because he’s apparently an evil genius. And we have our own genius upstairs, and he doesn’t seem to be evil, and he’s offered to help, and I don’t have another idea. This is what we do; this is the safest plan I can come up with.” 

Eames looked at him for a moment. And he hated to admit it but Arthur was right. They had to practice somehow, and Sherlock knew Moriarty well, he had a plausible theory, and he seemed much less likely to destroy them immediately than Moriarty was. “You’re not going in alone,” Eames said flatly. 

“That’s my _job_ , Eames.” 

“No. Stop it. For Christ’s sake, this isn’t even me being selfless or anything like that. What the hell am I supposed to do if something goes wrong and you get destroyed in there? At least let me go in with you so I can shoot one of you out of the dream if the experiment fails.” 

Arthur had an odd fixed expression on his face, and Eames wondered suddenly if he’d given himself away, if it was obvious how much Eames would do to keep Arthur safe at Eames’s own expense. 

But Arthur said, “Eames. Could you forge me?” 

“Could I forge you?” Eames tried not to be offended. “Arthur, I could forge Moriarty after seeing him for two minutes. Of course I could forge _you_ ; I know you better than anyone else in the world.” The words were out before Eames could bite them back as being too starry-eyed. 

But Arthur didn’t even seem to register them. “That’s what we’re going to do,” he said, his voice soft with the eureka moment of a plan coming together. “We’re both going to go in, and you’re going to forge me.” 

“And what will that accomplish?” Eames asked, not quite following. 

“We’re going to treat this like a normal extraction. Like we would if we were extracting Moriarty. Get into Sherlock’s head, get the information he’s keeping a secret, get out. We’ll use the hotel dreamscape from the inception job: because it’s our most recent one together, we’ll probably remember it the best, and we don’t have time right now to come up with a new one.” 

“Fine,” Eames agreed. 

“He’s going to have to pick one of us to go after. He can’t pick us both because we’ll separate. As soon as we get in the dream. You take the stairs, I’ll take the elevator, and we’ll see who he comes after. Whoever he follows, the other one does the extraction. The one of us being followed, we’ll hold him off, just like we would Moriarty. Make Sherlock work for it. If he thinks he can show us how it’s being done, I want this to be game-time conditions. There’s no way Sarah Miller and her team rolled over for Moriarty, but they probably stuck together, probably made it so he knew which one was forming the dreamscape, which one to target. I don’t want him to know. Once we’ve finished the extraction, whoever it is, we’ll find the other and get us all out of there.” 

“So if he decides to follow you?” 

“I’m good at merry chases,” Arthur reminded him with a ghost of a grin, dimples peeking through. Of course. Because Arthur was a mad lunatic who was never happier than when he was all tied up with danger. “What if he picks _you_?” 

“Don’t worry about that,” Eames said. “I’ve got another concern about your plan.” 

Arthur looked offended. “What’s that?” 

“Why do you get to take the lift?” asked Eames, and Arthur rolled his eyes at him, and Eames grinned and said, “Let’s go do this.”


	19. Chapter 19

Chapter 19

Sherlock’s projections ran a colorful gamut, much more so than most people’s projections ever did, and they made an interesting crowd jumbling in Arthur’s sleek hotel lobby. Sherlock stood looking between two identical Arthurs, and then they separated. 

Eames dashed through the lobby, dodging the projections who paused to look in his direction, and barreled into the stairwell, trusting that Arthur had taken the lift as agreed. Eames didn’t hesitate, taking the stairs two at a time. Arthur, he thought, really wasn’t a bad person to forge. Eames sometimes spent dreams stifled in bodies that weren’t exactly made for running and dodging bullets. It was refreshing to be Arthur. 

A door opened above him, and Eames stopped running, stood in the stairwell, listening. A step behind him, measured and precise, and Eames glanced over the railing in time for Sherlock to look up at him, meet his eyes. Then Sherlock had chosen the wrong Arthur, thought Eames, and let himself be a little bit proud of his skill. That meant that Arthur would be working his way toward the extraction. 

Eames decided that this meant that Arthur would no longer be worrying about the lift, because Arthur would have realized that Eames had worked as decoy and Arthur would be worrying about the extraction now. And Eames wasn’t about to keep going up and down and all around Arthur’s paradoxical staircases. He needed to present a bit of a challenge or Sherlock would get suspicious. So Eames emerged from the stairwell into the hallway. A couple of projections, just back from a dinner date and walking to their room, gave him a long look as he passed by. 

Eames smiled jovially at them and said, “Such a lovely evening, isn’t it?” and they frowned heavily. Eames pressed the button for the lift and kept smiling, just as Sherlock emerged out into the hallway. He wasn’t moving quickly, and Eames wondered if he was still trying to make up his mind if he’d picked the right Arthur. So Eames didn’t give him a cheeky little wave as he stepped onto the lift, because that would have given it away; Arthur would never have done such a thing. 

Eames pressed the button for the top floor of the hotel, then emergency stopped it as soon as it started moving. This set off an alarm and Eames hoped it would throw Sherlock’s projections into disarray. It would attract them to this point and away from wherever Arthur was, hopefully.

Eames removed Arthur’s helpfully installed trapdoor—Arthur’s dreamscapes were always so beautifully maintained down to every last detail, Arthur never forgot any of it—and pried open the doors on the floor above. The hallway was deserted, and Eames considered his options, then went back to the stairwell. Eerily quiet. He almost didn’t like it. Where the hell was Arthur; surely he had to be almost done by this point? Arthur moved quickly and knew the layout of this place, knew where it was likely Sherlock would hide the most important things in his head. 

Eames began heading up, and, as he went, he realized he was getting light-headed, as if he was climbing a mountain instead of a set of hotel stairs. A headache pressed behind his eyes, bright and urgent. He felt slow and almost dizzy and eventually he realized that he’d stopped moving altogether. He stood on the staircase, disoriented, closing his eyes against it, and he was pondering whether something was going wrong with the compound and whether he ought to shoot himself out of the dream when the little canister landed at his feet and the gas started hissing out of it. 

***

Eames did a circuit of the bedroom, gun in his hand, stepping skillfully through the patterns of moonlight on the floor. He was uneasy, and he didn’t know why, couldn’t remember why he’d grabbed the gun and started prowling through the bedroom in the first place. 

Arthur said, from the bed, “Come back to bed, would you?” He sounded grumbly and displeased, huddled under the pile of blankets. 

Eames couldn’t shake the feeling of something being wrong. Something being _off_. “I thought I… Did I hear something?” 

“It was probably your own snoring,” grumbled Arthur. 

“I don’t snore,” Eames protested automatically, and patted himself down for his totem, because there was something _wrong_ about this. Wasn’t there? He was only wearing pants, so there was no surprise that his totem wasn’t on him. 

“I didn’t hear anything, you’re being paranoid, come to bed,” said Arthur, all calm authority, and would Arthur have sounded like that if something was wrong?

Eames settled slowly into the bed, putting the gun on the nightstand as he went. “Arthur, how did we get here?” he asked, unable to shake the uneasiness. 

“Christ knows,” Arthur said sleepily, even as he cuddled against Eames as if it were the most natural thing in the world. He pressed his face into Eames’s neck and said, “I think you drugged me, because you’re actually the world’s most fucking annoying person, especially when you wake us up in the middle of the night to play with guns, but you’re good in bed and sometimes I think you’re amusing, so I guess there’s that. Now go to sleep, hmm?” 

Eames had no idea what to say to that. Eames felt like he couldn’t breathe. Eames still wasn’t entirely sure he was awake. Arthur insinuated a leg between Eames’s and sighed a happy little sigh against him, and Eames thought that was fine, he didn’t want to wake up after all. 

_No, no_ , he told himself. _Dangerous. Think about this. How did you get here?_ Where were his trousers? His totem would be in his trousers. His gaze lit on the nightstand, where Arthur’s totem sat, and he reached for it and rolled it. Five. “Arthur, what does your totem come up in a dream?” he asked. 

“As if I’d tell you,” said Arthur, suddenly scathing. 

Eames hesitated, still feeling so off-balance that he thought it possible he might slide entirely off the planet if he moved the wrong way. Arthur was tucked up against him, warm and solid, but his tone had abruptly been cold and distant. And, granted, Eames had unthinkingly asked a very personal question, but they were cuddled in bed together and Eames wasn’t sure he’d deserved that level of ire. “I just meant—” he began. 

“You won’t be happy until you push and push and push at me to make me leave,” Arthur cut him off viciously. 

“I…” began Eames, confused. “That’s not—”

Arthur propped himself up, rising over him, his face too in shadows for Eames to see. “Because I will, you know. I’ll eventually leave. You’ll do something wrong, push it too far, and I’ll realize how _ridiculous_ all this is, how _absurd_ , how much _better_ I could do than you. You know that, right? You expect it every moment, don’t you? Wait for me to come to my senses and leave. Wonder why I haven’t done it yet. Well, I have a secret for you: I haven’t left you yet because I’m biding my time. I’d much rather keep you off-balance, you know.”

Eames felt very cold. Cold where Arthur was no longer pressed up against him. Cold where Arthur’s words were curling into him. He was destroying this. He’d had Arthur cuddled next to him in bed and he was already destroying it, effortlessly. To be expected, really. “Arthur—” he began, already feeling the futility of it. Arthur would leave, of course he would leave, because Arthur was _sensible_ and—

Arthur vanished into thin air. 

Eames blinked and sat up, alarmed and astonished. 

And Sherlock said, standing by the side of the bed, “I see I picked the wrong Arthur. But you get the general idea.” And then he picked up Eames’s gun and shot himself in the head. 

***

Arthur made a split-second improvisational decision to forego the elevator, suddenly worrying that maybe Sherlock would have been able to read something about their previously agreed upon plan. So instead Arthur darted around the side of the hotel, back to the service entrance. There were projections there, leaning against the wall smoking, conducting some sort of shady drug deal, juggling. Sherlock’s projections were really quite something, Arthur thought. They glared at him as he went by, but clearly most of Sherlock’s subconscious was focused on Eames. Because Eames had, as Eames always did, done a spectacular job with what Arthur had asked him to do. So this left Arthur the one free to perform the extraction and get them out. 

Arthur barked at the projections, giving himself authority so they might believe he belonged there, “Get back to work.” 

They looked mainly uncertain at this directive, but they didn’t look inclined to fall upon him and tear him to pieces, so that was good. 

Arthur moved through the maze of rooms that led to the hotel safe, which he blow-torched through with ease. A few projections watched him uneasily, but also kept wandering out of the room, plainly distracted by goings-on elsewhere. Whatever Eames was doing, he was still doing a characteristically good job. Arthur worked, feeling relaxed and in-control. This was so easy, at this rate the Moriarty thing would be a piece of cake. 

The safe was empty. 

Arthur stood for a moment and regarded it, frowning, and then realized that that made total sense and he should have realized that. Sherlock had a tricky and suspicious subconscious, guarded against the invasiveness he showed toward everyone else’s. Of course he wouldn’t have picked somewhere as obvious as the hotel safe for his most treasured thoughts. 

Arthur found himself at a momentary loss. No wonder the projections had let him do as he pleased over here. He’d been on entirely the wrong track. 

And, to make things worse, he felt…odd. Syrupy. Slow. Like he wasn’t moving as quickly as he normally did, like everything in the dream was beginning to lag ever so slightly. Arthur didn’t like the feeling. He’d never encountered anything like that in a dreamscape before. He wondered what Sherlock was doing to cause it, if that was what Moriarty had done to the other dreamsharers. He pondered if he should kick himself out of the dream and end the experiment, but hopefully Eames was handling himself, and Arthur felt like he had to see this through to its conclusion. 

Somewhere alarm bells started clanging. Projections started running toward the scene of the commotion. Eames, buying him time while he made a mess of things. Arthur thought of all the rooms in this hotel he’d populated and cursed himself for choosing the hotel as the architecture. There were so many places to hide and Arthur felt so tired and sluggish. 

And then he thought of room _numbers_. During the inception job, they’d used the room numbers to guide Fischer where they’d wanted him to go. Maybe Sherlock had likewise chosen a room number that was meaningful to him. 

_Meaningful number_ , thought Arthur, already making his way to the elevator bank. One of them was out of commission, but he called the other one confidently. No one even looked askance at him as he stepped on, sifting through everything he knew about Sherlock Holmes. The primary one being that the most important person in his life was John Watson. And Arthur knew no numbers associated with John Watson. Except for 221B Baker Street. 

Arthur had to fight off some projections to get to Room 221, which only told him he was on the right track. And at least the fighting went well, seemed to resist the odd effect the Somnacin seemed to be having on him. An allergic reaction? But he’d used his own compound, so that seemed unlikely. 

Too exhausted to waste time with finesse, he blow-torched his way into the room. And what he found waiting for him was an entire room devoted to John Watson. Practically a fucking shrine. 

***

And then Arthur was somewhere he’d never been before. At least, he didn’t think he had been. Although it seemed oddly familiar to him. He was in a large, open living area, in a sleek, modern penthouse. Behind him was a wall of windows. It was nighttime, and the skyline of the city was twinkling at him. Familiar, again, but he couldn’t place it. The penthouse itself consisted of a cozy seating area in front of a gleaming black-and-white fireplace that swept up to meet a state-of-the-art, brand-new-looking kitchen, and then met a marble foyer leading to the door. The furnishings were…surprisingly antiquated for the modern architecture. In fact, there was something about the whole place that felt like _Arthur_. Which was an odd thing to think, but he liked the juxtaposition of the old with the new, he tended to gravitate toward it, and he would have furnished this penthouse with the antiques he was now looking at. 

In fact, he realized, the couch he was staring at was actually his. 

He walked over to it. Not just _like_ his, it _was_ his. Arthur had bought it for a song in a street market in Morocco and had it shipped to Manhattan, where it had pride of place in his Greenwich Village _pied a terre_. And he knew the couch, knew it well, knew the scuff along the left foreleg, knew the scratch on the right arm, just so, to look like a demonic smiley face. 

This was his couch. _His couch_. Arthur looked around the penthouse again, feeling confused. His couch. But not his place. Not any place he could remember owning. He didn’t think. There was a Titian over the fireplace, and a Kandinsky gracing the foyer. And, on the table in the foyer, a hideous vase that Arthur sensed was worth a ton of money and was clearly something Eames would have chosen. And in the kitchen, on the stove, was a pot, and when Arthur removed the cover, it was bouillabaisse. 

Something, Arthur thought, was very, very wrong. Where was his totem? He was wearing jeans and a T-shirt that was much too big for him. No shoes or socks. Glock tucked into his waistband, comforting at the small of his back. But no totem. 

A dream, he thought. This had to be a dream. But whose? And how had he ended up there? 

He padded over to the adjoining room, which turned out to be an enormous bedroom. Arthur ignored the furnishings in favor of stepping into the large bathroom. He turned on the light and looked at himself in the mirror. His hair was loose and curling over his forehead. And his T-shirt was gray with _Paris is for lovers_ written on it in ridiculous curly script. What the actual fuck, thought Arthur. He never looked like this in _dreams_. He didn’t ever look like this in reality, though, either, so—

And then he heard the door open. 

The gun was in his hand before he even thought about it, and he sidled to the bathroom door and waited, listening, ready to make a move. 

“Arthur, darling, it’s just me, don’t shoot!” called Eames’s voice. 

Arthur breathed a small sigh of relief and went out to the living area slightly more relaxed. 

Eames was struggling out of a heavy-looking backpack in the foyer. He looked exhausted, travel-worn and weary, his hair in disarray and his sorry-looking shirt even more wrinkled than usual. His forehead was creased with lines and he was frowning and his stubble had driven right past devil-may-care and was approaching beard-level. Arthur stood in the living area, gun half-raised, wary but hopeful that Eames would help things make sense soon. 

Eames glanced at him. And then Eames _beamed_. There was no other word for it. He saw him and smiled, wider, opener, younger than any smile Arthur had ever seen him smile before, and laugh lines radiated out from eyes that were suddenly brighter, and everything about him seemed to lift and polish somehow, just from looking at Arthur. Arthur froze in the face of it, could not make sense of it, hesitated, confused. 

“Christ, you’re a sight for sore eyes,” Eames grinned at him, and it wasn’t teasing or mocking, it sounded _sincere_. He headed across to him, his long strides eating up the space between them. And then, startling Arthur more than he should have when Arthur was still holding a gun, he basically collapsed on top of Arthur, pulling him into an embrace, winding his arms around him and burying his face in the curve of Arthur’s neck and just _breathing_ , one long inhale and, on the exhale, relaxing completely, holding Arthur more tightly. 

Arthur had no idea what to do in response to this. He stood awkwardly and let Eames hug him and tried to think of what he could possibly say. 

Eames mumbled into his neck, “God, you smell fantastic. And it should be disturbing that I like it when you wear my T-shirts and point a gun at me, shouldn’t it?” 

The _Eames’s T-shirt_ explained that detail and yet made everything more confusing all at once. “Eames,” Arthur said carefully, not moving an inch, because he didn’t really want to disturb their position but he also didn’t want to actively participate in this little piece of insanity. “How did we get here?” 

Eames chuckled, and Arthur felt the warm whoosh of it against his skin, and Arthur closed his eyes to let the feeling of that sink into him. “All right,” Eames said good-naturedly. “I deserve that.” His lips brushed a kiss against Arthur’s clavicle, and then impossibly started moving up Arthur’s neck. Arthur thought he should tell Eames to stop but really he just tilted his head to make sure Eames had enough access. The nibbling on Arthur’s neck wasn’t exactly conducive to talking, but Arthur had never known Eames to forego talking, ever. “The job took longer than I said it would, I know, but that’s what happens when I have to slum it with other point-men, and don’t I get any credit for saying out loud that I missed you madly, even though you are a complete bastard?” Eames finished his circuit up Arthur’s neck and straightened, looking at him with a small smile playing about his lips. 

Eames was _confident_ , Arthur thought. Eames was confident that Arthur was going to kiss him back, say he missed him too, think this was all utterly normal. Where the fuck was Arthur’s totem? he wondered, desperately. Because this was _so obviously_ a dream. He cut his eyes beyond Eames, spotted it suddenly sitting on the kitchen counter, and breathed a sigh of deep relief. 

Eames glanced over his shoulder at where Arthur was looking and then turned back to Arthur, still looking good-natured. No, _affectionate_. “If you bloody check that totem one more time,” he threatened, almost laughing. 

“Do I check it a lot?” asked Arthur faintly, still not sure what to do. This _had_ to be a dream, but _how_ and _why_? Arthur didn’t know what his next move ought to be. He was feeling impossibly confused. 

“I’m not going anywhere,” Eames told him, sounding very serious. “Not permanently. Stop checking it. You’re not going to wake up.” And then Eames kissed him. Eames kissed him as if he kissed him all the time. Eames kissed him casually, familiarly, and Arthur was too stunned to even respond, just stood stock still and let Eames kiss him. “Ah, I see,” Eames growled at him after a moment of this. “You’re going to make me work for it, aren’t you?” And then Eames closed his teeth around Arthur’s bottom lip and tugged his hands into Arthur’s hair, and Arthur groaned his acquiescence, kissing him back. “Darling,” mumbled Eames into Arthur’s mouth, and Arthur thought how Eames really _never stopped fucking talking_ , “if we have sex right now, will it ruin the bouillabaisse you’re making?” 

At least he was talking about good things. Really good things. And at least he was talking as his hands found their way under Arthur’s shirt. Arthur thought that he should try to control this dream he must clearly be trapped in, try to figure out what was going on and why, and decided that that could all wait until after they had sex, absolutely. 

“No,” Arthur said definitively, not caring either way. Arthur thought _no_ was the most he was willing to say, given that every word he said was time spent not kissing Eames, and Arthur was against that. 

Eames nipped at Arthur’s kiss, resisted Arthur’s attempt to deepen it. “Now, darling, I think you’re just saying that and haven’t seriously considered the condition of the bouillabaisse—”

“Is my bouillabaisse better than sex, Eames?” Arthur demanded crossly. 

“Well, it _is_ fucking spectacular, love,” said Eames, grinning at him. 

Arthur didn’t know what to do with any of this. They didn’t just have sex, they laughed their way through it. What _was_ this? “Shut up,” Arthur told Eames, thinking that he couldn’t stand any of this anymore. He needed to shoot his way out of this dream— _this had to be a dream_ —but instead he backed Eames up against the penthouse window and dropped to his knees. 

“Oh, excellent, we’re making progress,” Eames announced jovially, looking down at Arthur and winking with a good-natured leer. 

Arthur shook his head in what he hoped looked like exasperation instead of finding Eames adorable, but he ruined the effect by failing to tear Eames’s pants off of him and instead just leaning his head against Eames’s abdomen, forehead pressed into the cheap fabric of Eames’s terrible shirt. “I missed you, too,” he said, which was ridiculous considering he couldn’t remember anything beyond a few minutes ago but also true in its way, because Arthur missed Eames constantly, Arthur missed Eames even when he was in the room with him, because Arthur never got _this_. 

Eames’s hands, strong yet gentle, full of affection instead of passion or lust, combed through Arthur’s hair. “I know, love,” he said so tenderly, as if he knew exactly how much Arthur ached for him every minute. 

And then there was a gunshot. 

Arthur registered the sharp retort of it and reached automatically to drag Eames down, but instead Eames pitched forward onto him, and Arthur had to move quickly not to get trapped underneath him. Another gunshot whistled over their heads, shattering the window. Arthur sprawled out on his stomach and aimed the Glock out the window, toward the trajectory where the shots had come from. He emptied his entire clip and then he crawled over to Eames.

Who looked terrible. He was lying in a pool of his own blood, pouring out from the gunshot wound that was in his back. No exit wound, Arthur could see very clearly, although Eames was pressing a hand weakly against his chest, Arthur supposed because it hurt. He was deathly pale and was trembling violently. His breathing was labored. Arthur had taught himself enough medicine to get by in the battlefield that was his life, and he looked at Eames and knew immediately that there was nothing he could do and also _could not believe it_. 

“Eames,” Arthur said, and leaned over him, spoke firmly. “Listen to me: this is a dream.” 

“Arthur,” Eames rasped out. 

“No. Listen to me. _This is a dream_. You’re waking up somewhere, okay? And I’ll be right behind you.” 

Eames shook his head jerkily and said again, “Arthur.” 

“ _Stop it_!” Arthur shouted at him, and Eames flinched, and then Arthur felt remorse, because Eames was bleeding out on the floor in front of him and he’d yelled at him. “Eames, it’s a dream, right?” Arthur pushed Eames’s hair off his forehead, winced at the cold, clammy sweat of it. “It was always a dream. Right?” 

Eames shook his head again, a quick, minute movement, and managed, “Dreams aren’t that good.” 

“Shut up,” Arthur told him desperately, and pressed his face into Eames’s chest. “Oh my God, be quiet, please, it’s not true, this is a dream, it’s just a dream, we’re going to wake up, please just wake up.” Underneath him, Eames was terribly still, as quiet as Arthur had just begged him to be, and Arthur realized that the ragged, tearing breaths filling the penthouse were his and his alone. “Eames, please,” he said. “Please just wake up.” He knew the gun wasn’t far from him. He needed to dream himself more bullets and wake himself up. Surely he would be able to dream himself more bullets. Because this _had to be a dream_. 

His cell phone rang, startling him. Arthur sat up and wiped at his face, surprised when his hand came away wet, because he hadn’t thought he’d been crying. He dug the phone out of his pocket and frowned at the caller ID, which indicated it was his mother. 

“Mom?” he answered. 

And his mother said nothing. His mother sobbed in his ear. His mother wailed. In the background, Arthur could hear a gunshot. 

Arthur scrambled away from Eames’s body. “Mom, what’s happening? Mom. _Tell me where you are_.” 

His mother didn’t. His mother sobbed. Arthur looked at his gun, which he’d abandoned on the other side of Eames’s body, and he was just about to lunge for it when the world tipped entirely upside-down, sending him careening away from the gun—

He woke up. 

He woke up and the first thing he saw was Eames, very alive, offering him a hand to help him up from the floor. 

***

By the time Eames scrambled for the gun Sherlock left behind and shot himself out of his dream, Sherlock wasn’t around him. Eames went tearing after him, shooting projections as he went to keep them away from him, but he had no idea where Arthur might be and where Sherlock might go to find him. But the dream was collapsing around him, the architecture of the hotel beginning to sag into impossibilities, chunks falling from the walls and ceilings, and that meant that, wherever Arthur was, he was unable to hold it together anymore, and Eames had to get him out of the second level dream and back to this one so he could kick them all out of it. 

Neither Arthur nor Sherlock was anywhere in the lobby. Nor were many projections. This gave Eames pause, and then he realized that _obviously_ following the projections would lead him to Arthur. That dream had thrown him way off. So Eames dodged falling plaster and began following the projections. 

Eames found the highest concentration of projections and fought his way through them to Room 222, which was not easy and involved a lot of creative dreamfighting to get there. Sherlock’s subconscious was _not_ welcoming and also, even more unfortunately, could not be easily tricked. But eventually Eames got through. 

And what he found was Arthur and Sherlock, both hooked up to a PASIV. Of course. That made total sense now. Sherlock had knocked Eames out, hooked him up to a PASIV, and manipulated his dream. Exactly what he was now doing to Arthur. 

Eames considered, and then Eames kicked Arthur out of the dream. 

Arthur woke with a gasp and stared up at Eames as if he was looking at a ghost, blinking at him uncomprehendingly. 

For long enough that Eames thought of Sarah Miller and her insanity and said, in urgent concern, “Hey. Arthur.” He actually crouched down to be on his level. “It’s me, right? It’s Eames.” 

“Eames,” said Arthur, and then suddenly shoved Eames around, his hands splaying over Eames’s back. “Oh, thank God,” Arthur sighed, and Eames wasn’t sure what to make of that, and then Arthur said, “We’re awake? Tell me we’re awake right now.” 

“We’re not,” Eames said regretfully. 

“ _Eames_ ,” said Arthur, sounding stricken. 

“But you _were_ dreaming.” Eames turned to face him again. “It was a dream, Arthur. You were on the second level.”

Realization dawned on Arthur’s face. “It was a second level dream.”

Eames nodded. 

“So this is the first level,” said Arthur. “So we’re still dreaming.” 

Eames nodded again, relieved that Arthur seemed to be rallying. Eames had woken disoriented, but whatever Sherlock had done to Arthur seemed to have thrown him more, thrown him enough that he’d woken with literally no idea where the dreams ended and began, which was very unlike Arthur. “We’re dreaming. This is your hotel, you’re holding it together. Check your totem.” 

Arthur turned from him and rolled it secretly and then turned back, satisfied, and then he marched over to where Sherlock was and literally threw him out of the chair. 

“ _Arthur_ ,” Eames said, alarmed, as the chair went clattering across the room. 

Sherlock was waking dazedly, shaking his head against it, because your first kick was never a pleasant one. 

“Hold off the projections,” Arthur snapped at Eames, and then he snarled at Sherlock, who was picking himself up off the floor, “You fucking son of a bitch,” and then he shoved him hard against the wall and landed a vicious right hook that snapped Sherlock’s head against the wall. 

“What the—Jesus Christ, Arthur!” exclaimed Eames, and then catapulted himself across the room to slam the door against the projections. 

Arthur followed up his right hook with a left hook, because Arthur was equally adept at punching with either hand—that was just Arthur for you. 

“It’s a dream,” Arthur bit out. “He’ll be fine. And he deserves it for what he just did.” 

Eames wondered in astonishment what Sherlock had done to Arthur. Then he thought of his dream Arthur saying cruel, vicious things to him and vanishing from his arms and he thought that he didn’t want to know. He could kind of understand how Arthur had woken up wanting to knock Sherlock around. 

“You asked me to,” Sherlock gasped accusingly. “You told me to show you what Moriarty was doing—”

Eames dragged the dresser in front of the door and tried to be the voice of reason, because maybe Arthur hadn’t gone entirely mad like Sarah Miller but Arthur had clearly woken not entirely himself. “He has a point, Arthur,” he managed. 

Arthur didn’t even seem to hear him. “You took that too far. That was over the top. You could have made your point with less.” 

Eames crouched down behind the bed, with a perfect sight line to the door, and dreamed himself up a very pretty sniper’s rifle, looking down the sight of it. He didn’t need such a nice rifle for this short distance, but he thought he deserved a bit of a treat. And he thought that maybe Arthur was right, because whatever Sherlock had done to Arthur had apparently been way worse than what he’d done to Eames. Which had been bad enough. 

“I really don’t think I could have,” Sherlock snapped. “I went easy on Eames and he doesn’t seem—”

“You did that to Eames, too?” said Arthur. 

A projection succeeded in budging the door open a bit, where it collided against the dresser. Eames aimed and shot him down calmly. 

“Eames is busy right now,” remarked Arthur, “so I’ll take care of this on his behalf.” Eames glanced over in time to see Arthur deliver a solid punch to Sherlock’s gut. 

“Thanks for that, pet,” said Eames, shooting down another projection. “But honestly, darling, he did what we asked him to do and once you settle down you’ll realize how incredibly instructive it is that he managed to get to you this much, hmm? To _you_. This much. On his first try. It was a dream. A really terrible one, but a dream. Take a deep breath, love. Because I kind of need you here.” 

There was silence behind him. Eames shot another project and then snuck a glance over his shoulder. 

Arthur had his head in his hands, his fingers tufted tightly into his hair. Eames blinked at him in alarm, as he said shakily, “I lost track. I couldn’t tell. Or I could but I didn’t—” Arthur cut himself off and dropped his hands and took a deep breath, seeming to visibly pull himself together. 

Sherlock stood against the wall and watched him with wary irritation, which Eames totally didn’t blame him for. 

Arthur said to him, “We are getting out of this ridiculous dream. You’re going to walk me through exactly what you did to me. And you’re going to tell me exactly how I stop anybody from ever doing it to me again.” 

“That was the _idea_ ,” spat Sherlock. 

“Eames,” said Arthur heavily, as he turned to him. 

Eames swung the rifle around and aimed it at Arthur’s forehead and said seriously, meeting his eyes, “It’s a dream, darling. We’re going to wake up right now. First you, then me, right behind you.” He had never before felt the need to reassure Arthur in a dream but it was pretty fucking obvious that Arthur needed it. 

Arthur gave him a grim smile and just said, “Yeah. That’s what I kept saying.” 

Eames hesitated a moment, unsure what to say to that, then decided the answer was to get the fuck out of this miserable dream. So he pulled the trigger.


	20. Chapter 20

Chapter 20

John sat, frustrated, watching dreamers dream and drumming his fingers against the desk. 

And then Arthur woke up, followed by Sherlock, followed by Eames, and all hell broke loose. 

“That was all uncalled for,” Sherlock snapped, hands feeling over his face. 

“Oh, shut up, you’re absolutely fine,” Arthur shot back. 

“I was only doing what you told me to do.” 

“You could have _warned_ us.”

“If I’d warned you, it would have defeated the point. The dreamsharers who dealt with Moriarty weren’t warned.”

“Right, but the goal was to _not_ drive us insane,” Arthur told him scathingly. 

“And I didn’t. You’re fine, aren’t you? I could have made that so much worse, and you know it. Things that happened on the phone could have happened—”

Arthur turned abruptly to John. “Shut him up, or I’m going to kill him.” 

“Okay,” John said, confused. “What the hell happened in there?” 

“A garden party,” said Eames, and then, “Arthur, check your totem.” 

“What the fuck,” said Arthur, “we weren’t three levels down.”

“Check it,” Eames said again. 

Arthur, frowning, turned away from them and rolled the die, once, twice. Then he collected it and turned back to them, lifting his eyebrows in inquiry at Eames. 

“So this is reality,” Eames said. 

“Yes. Verified.” 

“Okay. So shake off the bloody dream and sit down and do your job.” 

Arthur blinked at him. And then Arthur obeyed, and John couldn’t tell if he was astonished by that or if that was perfectly predictable. Arthur pulled out his notebook and said to Sherlock, “Walk me through exactly how you did that.” And then, “Eames, can you go out and get us coffee? Fancy-coffee-drink coffee?” 

“Can I what?” Eames seemed surprised by the request. 

“Coffee,” Arthur repeated flatly. “Can you get some.” 

“You want me to get us _coffee_?” 

“I have every confidence in your ability to do that, yes,” said Arthur, already scrawling in his notebook, although John couldn’t imagine what he was writing, as Sherlock hadn’t actually said anything yet. 

“Absolutely, Arthur,” drawled Eames sarcastically. “Best forger in dreamsharing, but you _think_ that I _might_ be able to handle fetching _coffee_. Makes sense. I certainly wouldn’t want to get in the way of you two geniuses as you work.”

“Thank you, Eames,” said Arthur lightly. 

Eames said to John, “It’s his fucking condescension that makes me love working with him so much.” And then he marched out of the room. 

John listened to him stomp his way down the stairs. 

Sherlock said, “Go with him.”

John stared at him. “What?”

“Stop him from pickpocketing people,” said Arthur, still scribbling away. “He’ll do it in his current state and it’s not that he’ll get caught but it’s inconvenient to have to deal with all the stolen wallets later.” 

Sherlock stood and bodily steered John out of the room. “Good-bye, John. Come back with coffee.” 

John sighed and huffed his way down the stairs and wished he had learned the trick of not just getting shoved around wherever Sherlock wanted him to go. 

Eames was standing on the pavement outside Baker Street, and for all John knew he was actively plotting how to divest the next passerby of his wallet. John didn’t really want that to happen, so he said jovially, “We can get coffee here,” and indicated Speedy’s. 

Eames said, “Fully half of the time I want to bloody strangle him.” 

John said, because Eames left himself wide open for it, “And the other half of the time?” 

Eames surprised him by laughing, because John would have thought that Eames would have had some kind of sharp retort about that. But Eames just laughed and said, “Yes, that is the problem, it’s true. You know how it is.” Eames moved past John to put a hand on the door of Speedy’s. 

John frowned and said, “No, I don’t.” 

Eames lifted skeptical eyebrows at him. “You don’t?” 

“Look, I know very well about wanting to strangle someone half the time, but the rest of the time isn’t…like that.” John was aware he finished that whole sentence lamely. 

Eames cocked a single eyebrow at him and said mildly, “Okay,” and went to open the door. 

“Hey,” John said sharply, hating being dismissed like that. “I’m not gay.” 

“So you don’t do gay relationships and Arthur doesn’t do relationships, period. I actually think that makes me the winner in the unrequited sweepstakes, since you at least understand what a relationship _is_.” 

John snorted. “And you think Sherlock does?” 

“He’s clever.”

“So’s Arthur.” 

Eames sighed. “I know this is going to shock you, given how frivolously Arthur has been behaving, but Arthur doesn’t mix business with pleasure. Arthur doesn’t even mix _pleasure_ with pleasure. Arthur doesn’t…pleasure.” 

“Why are we having this conversation?” John asked suddenly. 

“I have no idea. It’s been a strange day.” 

“You’re telling me,” said John. 

“And you haven’t even had your head messed with,” replied Eames. 

“Sod the coffee,” said John. “Want a pint?”

“I very, very badly want a pint,” said Eames. 

***

“That’s it,” Arthur said, as soon as he heard the Baker Street door close behind John. “You need to stop using that against me. I don’t care what else you use, but it has to stop being Eames.” 

“I didn’t choose Eames,” Sherlock replied, retrieving his violin and scratching his bow annoyingly against it. “You did.” 

“I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean,” said Arthur. 

Sherlock put his violin down just as abruptly as he’d picked it up. “Do you ever wonder what’s in your safe? What you keep close because it’s precious?”

Arthur thought of long days with Mal, when he was still a green recruit, when she was teaching him militarization. In those days, it had been his family. He hadn’t met Eames yet, and by the time he’d met Eames, he’d grown used to thinking of his subconscious as an impenetrable fortress. “You shouldn’t have been able to get in,” Arthur said, instead of thinking anymore about what exactly he kept in his subconscious safe. “We’re _trained_ , Eames and I. Not fake, government training from people who have never seen combat. We’d die if we couldn’t protect ourselves against the sort of thing you just did.” 

“It’s all in the Somnacin,” Sherlock said lazily. 

“I used my own compound.” 

“Not the Somnacin on this level,” Sherlock said, and looked at him. 

“The Somnacin you used for the second level,” Arthur realized. “What did you do to it?” 

“Made it lower your defenses. Make you unable to resist the dream. Blur the lines between what you want and what you have, and you didn’t want out of that dream. You did the work for me. You wanted that dream so badly you could taste it. So I gave it to you. And then I took it from you. It’s what Moriarty would have done to them, only worse, he would have pushed it harder, twisted it harder. Surely you can see how I could have done that, how I actually went easy on you, gave you a fairly standard-grade nightmare, as they go.” 

Arthur’s mind raced through what Sherlock was saying. “But Somnacin doesn’t do that. Do you know how easy it would make my job if I could get Somnacin to do that?” 

“Well, you’ve been working with idiots, because Somnacin definitely does that if you just tweak the compound a bit.” 

Arthur tipped back on the desk chair and considered. “So you knocked me out and drugged me—”

“I’d been drugging you from the moment you stepped into the dream,” Sherlock said. “Both of you. I drugged the air you were breathing.” 

“But we weren’t breathing,” Arthur said. “It was a dream.” 

“Of course you breathe in a dream. You can suffocate in a dream, can’t you? I needed to slow your reflexes to have a chance to get close enough to you to get you under. I would imagine Moriarty tries a similar technique.” 

Arthur scribbled absently in his notebook, then realized he was writing _Eames_ over and over. He needed to rip that page out. “But…that’s not what Moriarty did to Sarah Miller. Sarah Miller’s memories were destroyed. You gave me a…fantasy,” Arthur admitted. “Sarah Miller was trying to protect what she had, but I don’t have that to protect.”

Sherlock shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. Not for the effect you need. Either would be enough, if pushed properly, to drive a person insane. The thing is: tweaking the compound guarantees that the dreamer dreams about something precious and important to them. Sarah Miller had precious and important memories. You don’t. Most of what’s precious and important to you is a fantasy.” 

Arthur suppressed his flinch, because, well, it was harsh to hear it set out as bluntly like that: _When you dream about the most important thing in your life, it’s a relationship that doesn’t even exist._ So instead Arthur said, “So you use the tweaked Somnacin to find out what’s most precious and important to a person. It’s not necessarily a secret they have locked up, like I would be looking for, it could be right out in the open, like Sarah Miller’s love of ballet and her husband. It could be anything. But once you find out what it is, you take it and you destroy it.” 

“Yes,” Sherlock agreed. “Poison it. Plant the seed of the idea in their head and—”

“And it grows,” Arthur finished. “Because it’s nothing they haven’t already been worrying about, in the deep dark recesses they don’t admit.” 

***

Sherlock sat and watched Arthur as he scribbled furiously in the notebook. Sherlock was ninety-seven percent convinced that Arthur wasn’t writing anything substantive, that Arthur wrote as a distraction, to give him time to consider his next steps. Arthur, Sherlock thought, was one of those very deliberate people who gave thought to every move they made. Such people were deadly boring, Sherlock thought.

If Sherlock hadn’t just been in Arthur’s brain, he would have been inclined to think Arthur, yes, extraordinarily dull and dismiss him. The fact that he was a career criminal was intriguing, it was true, but Arthur’s obsessive practicality made him little more than a Mycroft who’d made a left instead of a right, Sherlock had thought. But Sherlock had just been in Arthur’s brain. Remarkable thing, Somnacin, exposing to you immediately the hidden bits that Sherlock could only try to guess at. Sherlock hated to admit that there was any guesswork in what he did, but there were limits to the science of deduction. 

Like the fact that, although Sherlock had seen immediately that Arthur fancied Eames, he had not supposed that it was quite the depth that Arthur had exposed. He would not have thought that Arthur… _longed_ as much as it was clear he did when you were in his brain, when you could _feel_ it. Sherlock rather thought a straightforward sex dream, as unpleasant as that would have been, would have been easier to manage. And, also, would not have inspired the violent reaction Arthur had had. Sherlock could see quite easily how little effort it would take to break someone, once you were in their head poking around the things they held most precious. He had, of course, understood it in the abstract, but it had been impossible to prepare himself for how intensely it operated in practice. And there was a part of him that didn’t envy Arthur and Eames their jobs. There was a very large part of him that much preferred probing people’s brains from outside of them.

Sherlock thought about John. Sherlock thought of Arthur having been clever enough to find Room 221. Sherlock thought of how Somnacin had lost a little of its luster for him, now that he had to worry about how it would have been had Arthur been clever enough to somehow turn it onto Sherlock instead. Sherlock’s dream would have been a fantasy, too, he thought. 

Arthur’s thoughts must have been traveling a similar path, because he said, “Well, at least we have mutually assured destruction now.” 

“What does that mean?”

“You say anything to Eames about me, and I’ll tell John how your most precious thing is devoted entirely to him.” 

Sherlock looked over at him. “I’m not going to tell Eames.” He couldn’t imagine anything worse than someone just blurting out to John how precious he was to Sherlock. Sherlock was many things, but he liked to think he was not actually _cruel_ , not about something as personally applicable as this. 

Sherlock plucked at some strings on his violin. He thought of Eames’s dream. He said hesitantly, uncertainly, “But you should.” 

Arthur laughed. “Sure thing. Just as soon as you tell John.” 

Sherlock shook his head, frustrated. This, he was willing to admit, was not his forte, all of this _emotion_. “It’s different.” 

“In what way?” 

Sherlock regarded Arthur for a moment. He considered what he would think if someone—if Arthur, perhaps—had said to him, _John’s in love with you, too. You’ll be perfect together. It will end splendidly._ He would have…considered the astonishing loveliness of the idea, and then been furious at being teased that way, and pretend to wave it away but it would be _worse_ , to feel so terribly mocked. He’d never believe it coming from someone else. 

And maybe Sherlock had it all wrong, anyway. Maybe Eames’s dream hadn’t meant what Sherlock thought it meant. Maybe getting in the middle of whatever complicated emotional relationship existed between Arthur and Eames was the opposite of what Sherlock should do. He was supposed to be solving the puzzle of Moriarty, and the rest of this was all just distracting nonsense. Why would Arthur ever say anything to Eames? Why would anyone, ever, take such an extraordinary risk? 

So instead Sherlock took a deep breath and said, “Let me explain to you what I did to the Somnacin.” 

***

The pub was basically deserted, because it was still fairly early for pints, but John didn’t care. He fetched them two and joined Eames where he’d settled at a corner table, his back to the wall, giving himself a good view of the entire pub. John knew the tendency to sit that way. He was slumped deep in the chair, eyes watching everything raptly, but his posture made it look as if he was barely paying attention. He was also flipping a poker chip over his knuckles neatly. 

“Cheers,” he said, when John slid his pint over to him. 

“I should have made you buy,” John grumbled, trying to remind himself that he was having a pint with a criminal right now. Not that John necessarily had anything against criminals, in the abstract. John knew there were two sides to every story and not all criminals were bad people. John had very personal reasons for understanding that. But these were criminals who made their living invading other people’s brains and were now supporting Sherlock’s involvement in a Moriarty scheme, so John thought it made sense that he was wary of them. 

“I make it a point never to buy alcohol. Luckily, I always carry counterfeit currency for just that purpose. Or I just steal it from the hotel minibar. That’s what we did last night.” 

John sighed. “You are determined to emphasize with every statement how much you like to flaunt the law.” 

“You’re one of _those_ people,” Eames said, waving his hand dismissively. “Those…strong moral compass people, world in black and white, good and evil, and you know which side you’re on and you know which side I’m on. You were _born_ knowing everything in the universe. Christ, I wish I was as sure about anything as you lot always are about being _right_. For instance, you have Greedy CEO One come to you and say that he wants you to steal the secrets of Greedy CEO Two, and between the two of them, who’s to say which is the good and which is the evil? Or that they’re not both evil? Or that I’m not doing some kind of public service?” 

“By stealing liquor?” John said. 

“I don’t actually steal liquor,” Eames said. “First rule of working with a forger: We lie about practically everything.” 

“So you didn’t steal the liquor from the hotel minibar last night?” 

“Oh, no, that we absolutely did, but Mycroft deserved that bill.” 

John shook his head and sighed but didn’t really argue that point. He said, instead, “I heard rumors about it in the army.” 

“Dreamsharing?” Eames guessed. “Yes, that’s how it all got started. Military.” 

“Is that how you got involved in it?”

“Do I look like someone they’d let in the military?” 

John snorted. “You look _exactly_ like someone they’d let in the military.” 

Eames laughed. “All right, fair enough. But no, we philosophical types who read too much Hobbes while drunk have a difficult time going the Queen and country route. We choose a different kind of battlefield entirely.” 

“But still a battlefield,” noted John. 

“That’s just life. Only delusional fools think otherwise,” Eames replied. 

“I don’t know. In my experience, life can get pretty bloody boring pretty bloody quickly.” 

Eames chuckled. “Well, that’s when you go out and meet some mad detective who’ll fix that for you.” 

The jibe made John uncomfortable. He wished Eames would drop that discussion. And, if he wasn’t going to, then he was going to push it right back at Eames. “Or a bloke in a really expensive suit.” 

“Or that,” Eames allowed good-naturedly, eyes surveying the pub for threats. “Although yours is a bloke in a really expensive suit, too.” 

“They could have a contest over the most unnecessarily tight tailoring,” John agreed drily. 

“Those two should never have a contest over anything,” Eames replied. “They’re both so competitive, I shudder to think of it. Arthur’s not pleasant when he loses.” 

“Neither is Sherlock.” 

“I can imagine. Although Arthur is prone to brandishing guns, so his loss would worry me more.” 

“Sherlock also brandishes guns if I let him. So I don’t let him.” 

Eames looked suitably impressed. “I’m amazed you can exercise that amount of power.” 

“I once watched him scratch his own head with the barrel of a loaded revolver,” John said. 

“Well, Arthur would never do that. Not even in a dream. Do you know that I recently found out Arthur won’t smoke even in a dream because he says it smells vile? As if you couldn’t dream away the smell of smoke.” 

The casualness of this comment made John’s head whirl a bit, how easily Eames existed in two simultaneous worlds like that. “Do you get the dream and real life confused?” 

“Not if we can help it,” Eames said, thinking of Arthur’s panic when Eames had kicked him out of the second level dream. “That’s a recipe for disaster. Once a dreamsharer genuinely has trouble telling the difference, the dreamsharer should probably give it up. But we all have our little tricks.” 

“Arthur with the die,” John realized. 

“Exactly. What we call a totem. Makes sure we know when we’re in a dream versus when we’re in real life. Wouldn’t do to shoot someone in the face in real life, thinking you’re just waking them up.” 

“That’s what I mean. I would be terrified about that all the time.” 

Eames shrugged. “I don’t know. You just get to know it after a little while. The biggest thing is the reflexes, really. We’re under constant attack in a dream, so we start to act like everyone is always out to get us.” 

“Like sitting in a corner to survey the whole pub,” John pointed out. 

Eames smiled faintly. “Exactly. Our real lives are dangerous, too, but I think we mostly overreact because our adrenaline is out of balance.” 

“So how did you even get into all this?” John pushed again. 

“How do you get into anything? How did you end up a famous blogger of an impossible flatmate detective? Just happenstance, right? Just chance. One day I stumbled into dreamsharing, and I was good at it, so I did it. And that’s how it happens. For almost everyone in the universe except for Arthur, who has meticulously planned out every detail of his life. Do you know I met him on a beach? Rio, close to Carnival, not that it really matters for Rio. Everyone around me was basically naked, and Arthur was wearing this linen blazer thing. Dressed down for him, but I remember looking at him and thinking, ‘He is wearing a bloody _blazer_ on the beach in Rio. What a pretentious prick.’” Eames sipped his pint and said, “So naturally I never stood a chance, because you know how that goes.” 

“No,” John said with polite firmness, “I don’t.” 

“Oh, come off it,” said Eames, finishing his pint and looking as if he wished another one would just materialize there. “I’ve read your blog and I’ve met the two of you and I read people for my _literal living_ , so just come off it. You fell in love with him the first time you met him and you’ve been falling ever since. The thing about you, though, is that your problem is the _dichotomy_ problem. You were born knowing right from wrong and up from down and left from right. It’s why you hated being in the dream: you need the dichotomy, you can’t have all the possibilities all at once the way the dream is. So you thought you knew what you wanted, and you thought you knew what you wanted was a woman. You found what you wanted, and it turned out not to be a woman, but you can’t imagine having been _wrong_ all this time, so you’re just being an idiot about the whole thing.” 

“Oh, really?” said John, smarting. “I’m being an idiot in knowing my own sexuality?”

“No, you’re an idiot for not knowing it at all. Here’s the thing, right?” Eames talked expansively, his hands stacking his argument into a tower for John. “The odds of meeting a person that makes you feel alive, that makes you feel like getting up every morning is worth it, the odds of meeting that one person who makes you smile just knowing they’re in existence somewhere, Christ, those odds are so vanishingly small. We spend our whole lives searching for a needle in a haystack to get that person, and who are we to limit our choices by only looking at half the population? I’m not saying that you’re gay, and to be honest I’d never say I was, either. But I’m clever enough to know that what I decided to call myself matters not one bit in the face of the fact that I met someone who made me want to be a better person, gender be damned. You haven’t got there yet. And that’s stupid of you. Because you lead dangerous lives, you two, and something might happen, and you’ll kick yourself for never having admitted how you felt, for having wasted the time with him.” 

John stared at Eames, feeling furious, and he hated to admit that he wasn’t sure if he was furious over how wrong Eames was or how right he was. “That’s quite something,” he bit out, “coming from someone who I know has never breathed a bloody word to Arthur about how he feels” 

“But that’s because I have a reason for that,” Eames said, with a smile that was more sad than happy. “You’ve met Arthur, and you’ve met me, so you know that Arthur deserves better. Arthur _is_ better, in every way. It would be pointless to—”

“I don’t know what Arthur ‘deserves,’ but he’s here with you now, isn’t he?” 

“Arthur likes me, he respects me, we work well together, and he’d never wish me harm. That’s different, though. That’s not the way I want him.”

“It’s the only way you’ll have him unless you _tell_ him,” John pointed out viciously. 

“I know,” Eames sighed reflectively, looking out over the pub, and then scrubbed a hand over his face. “Go and get us another pint and we’ll drink to being cowards together.”

John didn’t analyze the fact that he did just that.


	21. Chapter 21

Chapter 21

Arthur’s notebook was full to the brim with chemical equations, and he was taxing his chemistry knowledge badly, and Sherlock kept snapping at him for not reaching conclusions quickly enough, but really the only conclusion Arthur could reach was that a few tweaks of the Somnacin compound while in a dream state would result in a much more potent drug that would manipulate dreamers into spilling secrets with ease. He didn’t understand how no one had ever stumbled upon this before. Granted, Sherlock was a chemical genius, but not everyone in dreamsharing was a slouch. 

It was dark by the time Arthur became aware that someone’s thumb was pressing behind his ear, a deep, thorough caress that made him have to bite back a groan because it was soothing the headache tense around Arthur’s scalp. Arthur actually reflexively worked the jaw he was clenching, and Eames’s index finger—because it had to be Eames—pressed at the joint of his jaw and said, “Are you coming back to the land of the living now?” 

“What are you doing?” Arthur asked, by which he intended to mean _Stop what you’re doing_ , but instead he tipped his head forward so that Eames could shift and splay his hand along the back of Arthur’s head, combing through hair that Arthur knew had probably traitorously started to cowlick along his neck. 

“Trying to get your attention because you and Sherlock have been so mutually caught up in each other that, frankly, I’m jealous.” 

Arthur looked past his notebook for what felt like the first time in hours and said, in surprise, “You brought me coffee,” because there was a to-go cup sitting within arm’s reach. He didn’t think he’d really expected Eames to fulfill his request. 

“I did. And you drank it. And I’ll have you know it was mostly sugar and cream and chocolate and not at all coffee and you loved every sip.” 

“I don’t even remember drinking it; how do you know I enjoyed it?” 

“I could tell.” Eames’s fingers were still kneading along the back of Arthur’s neck. “I am very good at recognizing enjoyment on the faces of others. You should see how I excel at this in horizontal situations involving low lighting.” 

Arthur rolled his eyes and listened to the negotiation occurring in the kitchen, where Sherlock and John appeared to be debating the necessity of eating dinner. 

“John suggested we order something,” said Eames. “Sherlock had a strop over that. They moved the argument to the kitchen. I decided that I was going to break you out of your workaholic fit to tell you that I’m knackered and we should go back to the hotel room and see if they’ve replenished our minibar.” 

“No more trick drinking games,” Arthur said, pressing his fingers against his eyes. “I still haven’t gotten rid of that headache.”

“The drinking game was _your_ idea,” said Eames.

Because Eames was right, Arthur decided to ignore him. “And why are you knackered? What did you do all day?” 

“I would have stayed and helped,” Eames pointed out, “but I was summarily dismissed.” 

Arthur felt a twinge of guilt about that. But having Eames in the room for a discussion about how having Eames die in front of him was the worst thing Sherlock could think of to do to him had not been an option, so it wasn’t like he could really apologize for it. “I know. So what did you do all day instead?” 

“I had pints with John, and we talked about unrequited loves and Hobbesian theories of morals and the dichotomy of real life and dream life.” 

“Oh, so just a typical day for you,” Arthur said drily. 

Eames sounded amused when he said, “Exactly. Anyway, I want to know what’s got you frowning so hard, but I’d prefer a breakdown somewhere that doesn’t involve non-dreamsharers who think they know more than they do.” 

“Yeah,” Arthur agreed, on a sigh, because he was tired and all he wanted to do was sprawl on one of the couches while Eames sprawled on the other and they could talk this nonsensical situation through together. “Let’s go home,” he said, and didn’t analyze when he’d started to consider the hotel suite prison _home_. 

***

They picked up Chinese on the way back to the hotel and sat on the floor around the coffee table—because the dining room table was completely colonized by this point and the coffee table had been easier to clear—and Arthur went over what he’d learned from Sherlock. 

“But Somnacin can’t do that,” Eames said, stealing some of Arthur’s beef and broccoli. 

“I know. I kept telling him that.” 

“If Somnacin could do that, we’d do that all the time. Hell, we’d be out of jobs, really, if it was that easy.” 

“I _know_. I told him all of this, and he insists that it’s true, that you can shift the compound to make the dreamer more suggestible, more manipulable.” 

“I mean, I know you can make modifications to it, make it better. Yusuf was very good at that sort of stuff. There was usually some kind of drawback, a wicked hangover or something like that, but you could usually make it a little bit more potent. But you and I, we are not easy heads to crack, _ever_ , and he walked right in, on his first try, and turned us both upside-down.” 

Arthur toyed with his beef and broccoli, turning it over in his chopsticks without interest. “Which means he’s got to be telling the truth. I can’t find a motivation for him to lie, and I know what he did, so it’s got to be true.” 

“I’ve never even heard _rumors_ about this sort of thing, though. How can that be?” 

Arthur shrugged and leaned back against the couch behind him and studied the rest of his food critically. He looked exhausted, Eames thought. He hadn’t looked good all day—Eames tried to think if Arthur had really drunk that much more than him—and whatever Sherlock had done to him in the dream hadn’t helped. Sherlock had been deliberately harder on Arthur than Eames, and just that little push more had made a noticeable difference in their psyches. Eames could imagine how easily that could be tipped into the state Sarah Miller had fallen into. 

And Eames was over his anger at being sent off on a coffee run like an errand boy. Whatever Arthur and Sherlock had discussed all day, it had clearly involved whatever had happened in Arthur’s dream, and knowing what had happened in his own dream, Eames knew why Arthur had felt the need for some privacy in that discussion. 

So Eames just said, “That’s enough for today, I think. You’re exhausted.” 

Arthur shook his head. “I’m fine.” 

“No, you’re not. And I drank you under the table last night, so it’s okay that you’re a broken, hungover mess today.” 

“You didn’t drink me under the table.” 

“I did.”

“That’s because you cheated at Never Have I Ever,” Arthur accused petulantly. 

“Arthur, darling, have you met me? I cheat for a _living_.” 

Arthur leaned his head back against the couch and sighed up toward the ceiling. And then he said, “We have to figure out the antidote to what Moriarty’s doing. We have to figure out a way to fight him off.” 

“Is Sherlock working on that?” 

“Trying to, anyway.” 

“Then there’s nothing more we can do tonight. Go to bed.” 

“I had the bed last night.” 

“I’m not tired,” Eames said. “Because I was the one drinking you under the table, not the one being drunk under the table.” 

“Cheater,” Arthur grumbled at him, getting to his feet. 

“Aw, darling, that’s the nicest thing you’ve ever called me,” said Eames and grinned when Arthur just glowered on his way to the bedroom. 

Eames sat and listened to the sounds of Arthur getting ready for bed. He turned on his Korean drama at a low volume, in case Arthur decided to stop back in before curling up in bed. But Arthur didn’t. After twenty minutes of silence from the bedroom, Eames got up to check. Arthur was a lump underneath the blankets, and when Eames stood over him he could hear that his breathing was deep and even. Satisfied, Eames went back out into the living room and stole Arthur’s laptop and hacked into Arthur’s email. Well, _tried to_ hack into Arthur’s email. Bloody paranoid Arthur had more protections built around his email than Eames felt like dealing with, frankly. 

So instead he gave up on the hacking and just went into his own email and sent Yusuf a quick note. _Working a job with Arthur–I think he’s told you? Chemist is telling us that we can make a few tweaks to the Somnacin in dream-state to make the subject completely pliable and defenceless. Seems too good to be true to me and Arthur. Thoughts? Have you been holding out on me all these years? –E._

Eames played a couple of games of Solitaire before he got a reply. _You’re as bad as Arthur with these all-business emails. Long time, no see, nice catching up with you. Somnacin is basically as potent as we can make it without serious side effects to both the dreamer and the dreamsharers. Trust me, those experiments have been done and the results were ugly and you don’t want any part of them. I don’t know who your chemist is but tell him to stop being an idiot and back off. I’m surprised A doesn’t know how dangerous that whole thing can be, his boyfriend was involved in it years and years and years ago (this predates all of us). Ahlam is doing well, thanks so much for asking. I’ll be sure to send you a cigar when the baby is born._

Eames read the email over twice, especially the part about Arthur’s boyfriend being involved. Then he wrote back. _How dangerous? Like, stop the chemist immediately dangerous? Why haven’t I heard anything about Cobb and dangerous Somnacin experiments?_

The reply was instantaneous. _YES, STOP THE CHEMIST IMMEDIATELY. And did you ever hear anything about Cobb inceptioning his own wife before that whole disaster of a job? No. You didn’t. Cobb plays closer to the chest than Arthur, why do you think they’re friends?_

Eames tapped his finger on the edge of the laptop, considering, then wrote back. _Thanks for the info. Don’t bother to send the cigar, I’ll just show up on your doorstep one day when you least expect it and be a very bad influence on your child while charming your wife thoroughly._

Yusuf wrote one last email back. _Fuck off_. 

Eames smiled and took the laptop into the bedroom, where he sat on the bed next to Arthur, not even bothering to be gentle about it. 

Arthur, as expected, twitched into immediate action and sprawled over him, pinning him down. 

“I highly encourage this position,” Eames informed him, “and don’t let me talk you out of it, but I need to talk to you about Cobb and Somnacin experiments and yes, I realize that is the least seductive thing I could have said to you at this moment.” 

Arthur blinked down at him for a bleary-eyed moment, then leaned fully over him to roll his die twice on the nightstand. Eames held his breath and thought of a terrible pickle-breathed politician he’d had to forge once, because otherwise he would think of Arthur, warm and sleepy on top of him, rubbing against him in all the very best places, and that would be no good. 

Arthur moved off of him, sitting up in the bed and switching on the bedside lamp and pushing his tumbled hair off his head. It was still respecting the remnants of the gel, caught halfway between curly and straight, and Eames added another file to his internal folder of Arthur Looking Adorable. “You need to talk to me about what?” Arthur asked, his voice still rough with sleep. “And you had to wake me up in the middle of the night to do it?” 

“Look, I emailed Yusuf after you went to bed because I didn’t understand how we’ve never heard about Somnacin being able to do this. And it’s not good.” Eames picked up the laptop he’d put by the side of the bed and showed Arthur. 

Arthur read through the email chain carefully, then read it again. “So Dom was running experiments with Somnacin on Mal? That’s what you want me to believe?” 

“That isn’t what Yusuf says. It’s just that Cobb keeps secrets and—”

“Fuck,” Arthur said, and opened a new email from Eames’s account. 

“Um,” said Eames. “You’re logged in as me, so—”

But Arthur just emailed Sherlock with the subject line _STOP ALL SOMNACIN EXPERIMENTS_ and sent it. 

“You think he’s going to listen to you?” 

“No,” Arthur said. “I don’t. Email John Watson and tell him the same thing.” Arthur pushed the laptop back over to Eames and then rolled himself over to the phone on the other side of the bed, picking it up and saying again, eloquently, “ _Fuck_.” 

“What now?” Eames asked, already navigating to John’s blog. 

“Mycroft fucking broke the fucking phone again and when this is over, I’m putting a hit out on him.” 

“If you put a hit out on him now, it would make our lives a lot easier,” Eames remarked, as Arthur rolled himself fully out of bed. He was dressed in a T-shirt and boxer shorts, and serious things were happening in their lives and Eames really did not have time to drool over Arthur, he _really, really_ didn’t. 

Arthur disappeared into the suite’s walk-in closet. Eames sent John a quick, terse email. Arthur emerged from the closet in a pair of jeans that hugged him in all the right places and a lavender pullover that looked impossibly soft. It was like quick-change magic, Eames thought, like Superman going into a phone booth to put on his costume. 

Arthur walked into the bathroom and Eames eyed the rear view and said, “Jesus Christ, Arthur, do you even tailor your _jeans_?” 

“Are you coming,” Arthur called through the door, “or are you just going to stay here obsessing over my clothing?” 

Eames thought he would be totally okay with staying in the hotel and obsessing over Arthur’s clothing in blessed privacy, but that was not the sort of coming Arthur was asking about and Eames needed to remember he was a professional and do his job now, so he said, “Where are you going?” 

“Baker Street.” Arthur came out of the bathroom, hair freshly put back into Arthur-approved stiffness. “I need to call Dom and I don’t have time to deal with whatever stupid thing Mycroft’s done because he thinks he can pretend to hold us prisoner here. Are you coming?” 

“Unless you think I could do you more good here,” Eames said honestly, because they were at the point where this was Arthur’s show and Eames was going to help however Arthur said he could. 

Arthur hesitated, then said, “No. Come.” 

And that settled that. 

***

Baker Street was clearly the sort of place that was used to middle-of-the-night visitors. Sherlock didn’t even blink an eye at their arrival, and John looked equally unsurprised, although he had to be roused from bed for the conversation. 

Arthur looked at the chemistry equipment all over the kitchen and said, “You have to stop all work with the Somnacin.” 

Sherlock frowned. “Why?” 

“Because our chemist tells us that use of the Somnacin this way leads to unpleasant side effects.” 

Sherlock lifted his eyebrows, looking unimpressed. “Unpleasant side effects?” 

“Arthur’s being very delicate,” Eames said. 

“What kind of side effects?” Sherlock demanded. “Moriarty seems to be fine.” 

“Moriarty is the _exact opposite_ of ‘fine,’” John said. 

Arthur didn’t feel like getting into a fight over this. “I need to borrow a phone.” 

“Fine,” said Sherlock, and handed his over without a second thought. 

“For what?” asked John, narrowing his eyes suspiciously, because John was always going to be the one who thought they were untrustworthy criminals, thought Arthur. 

“He needs to get more information on these vague side effects he’s worrying about,” Sherlock snapped. “Obviously.” 

“Is there somewhere private I can make this call?” Arthur asked. 

“Private?” echoed Eames, and arched an eyebrow at him. 

Arthur gave him a quelling look that would have sent anyone else into stammers, but Eames was too fucking used to Arthur and just kept arching that eyebrow at him, and Arthur thought they had to start working together less. 

“You can use my bedroom,” John offered. “It’s at the top of the stairs.” 

“Thank you,” said Arthur primly and snatched the cell phone and walked upstairs. 

Probably Eames would have been able to tell Arthur a thousand details about John based on John’s room, because that was how Eames was. Really, Eames and Sherlock would get along well. Eames wasn’t freakish with deductions, but he was really good at reading people in a way Arthur just _wasn’t_. Reading people wasn’t easy for Arthur, he worked very hard at it. 

Which was why it stung him so much whenever people gave him those pointed looks about Dom. Arthur was well aware that his judgment when it came to people wasn’t as good as it could have been. After all, he’d gone and fallen in love with _Eames_ , and if that didn’t prove poor judgment, Arthur didn’t know what did. He knew that, as a result, he was prickly and, if you were being unkind about it, paranoid, cool and distant and arm’s-length in dealings, because he just never _knew_ about people. 

But he had trusted Dom, above and beyond any other business associate, and that was the kind of old habit that it was hard for Arthur to break. Actually, truthfully, Dom _wasn’t_ a business associate, had been a close friend for ages now, and he hated that people thought his loyalty to him made him a suspect lunatic. 

Arthur got Dom’s voicemail, which didn’t surprise him because no competent dreamsharer would ever answer a call from an unknown number like that. So Arthur left a message. “It’s me. Call me at this number.” 

And Dom called back immediately, and when Arthur answered he said, “Arthur? What’s wrong? Where are you?” 

And this was why Arthur was loyal to Dom. Because Dom may have had a little bit of a nervous breakdown in the wake of what had happened with Mal, but who could blame him for that, and Arthur had always known— _always_ —that if it had been Arthur in the middle of the nervous breakdown, Dom wouldn’t have left his side. Arthur could call Dom at any moment and have Dom ready to find a sitter for his kids so he could get to Arthur to offer help. He and Dom had been together through thick and thin, complementing each other well enough that they had neither one of them ever thought of finding other people to work with. And then, when it had all gone to hell, Arthur had stayed because he’d known that Dom would have done the same for him. Arthur had never been in love with Dom, the teasing dreamshare rumors notwithstanding, but he had always understood how Mal had been, because Dom was smart and charming and also, underneath it all, in the part you had to hide so often to survive, _nice_. 

Arthur smiled despite himself. He leaned against the wall and looked out John Watson’s window and said, “I’m in London, and I’m fine.” 

There was a moment of suspicious silence. Then Dom said, “‘Fine’ on what number on a scale from one to ten?” 

Arthur laughed. “No, really, I’m fine. I’m on a job. With Eames.” 

Dom had always had a high opinion of Eames’s professional capabilities, so Arthur could practically feel Dom’s relaxation all the way from L.A. “Oh. Well, tell him I said hello.” 

“I will. I have a question.” 

“I assumed, because you have never once in our years of acquaintance called me just to talk.” 

Arthur ignored this and got right to the point. “Did you do experiments with Somnacin to make the dreamer more suggestible, more easily manipulated?” 

“Somnacin is the easiest it can be. Don’t you think if we could get it easier, we would?” 

The dodge made Arthur’s stomach swoop. “Not what I asked.” 

“Arthur, there’s no way to get Somnacin more effective topside. Believe me, I’ve tried. Numerous chemists have tried. There’s no way.” 

The careful choice of words lit up the alarm bells in Arthur’s brain. No way to get it more effective _topside_. But Sherlock had used his solution while they’d all been below. And so had Moriarty. “What about in a first level dream? Can you tweak it there?” 

There was a long moment of silence. 

Arthur bit out, “Dom, I need to know this information.” 

“You can do it.” Dom sounded reluctant to admit it. “It can be done. Your chemist would need to be a genius and you run the risk of the first-level dream collapsing while you’re doing it. But it technically _could_ be done.” 

“So why don’t we do it?” Arthur demanded. 

“Because it’s not good, Arthur.” 

It sounded to Arthur like a vast understatement, and he said suddenly, immediately, “Is that what happened to Mal? Is that why she got so confused? Were you fucking with the Somnacin?” 

Dom sighed heavily. Arthur had thought he would snap back viciously, but he just sounded sad and tired when he answered. “In the early days of dreamsharing, the experiments on Somnacin were commonplace. Everyone thought they could refine it, make it better. I wasn’t experimenting on Mal so much as the experimentation, on _everyone_ , was just _constant_. Chemists were throwing things together like they were making brownies.” 

Arthur let it go. They had long since passed the point of blame when it came to Mal, he thought. “So what happened with the first-dream version of Somnacin?” 

“The drug was too potent. Its use ends with the dreamsharers going insane.” 

“All of them?” Arthur clarified, thinking of Sarah Miller but also thinking of Moriarty. “Not just the person who’s head is being extracted from?” 

“All of them,” Dom confirmed. “The whole team. Everyone on that first level dream who went down to the second level with the altered Somnacin. It was…terrible. The chemist who first had the idea, he was a genius. And it seemed okay to start with. And then, after prolonged, continued use, the members of his team started going insane, one by one. It ended with the chemist shooting all of them and then turning the gun on himself. Another genius chemist replicated his efforts, with the same end result. So people stopped messing with the Somnacin in that particular way, and life moved on.” 

“I’ve never heard about any of this. Me or Eames.” 

“It predates your involvement in dreamsharing. It was _very_ early days. And chemists who kept insisting on trying to get it better usually ended up dead eventually, so it wasn’t like institutional knowledge was being passed on. You’d need a genius, though, to even be close to getting it to the compound you need. Who are you working with?” 

“He’s new to dreamsharing,” Arthur said automatically, his mind ticking over everything. 

“Well, tell him to stop what he’s doing. Do a standard dreamshare and extract the information. You and Eames are good enough to get it done, even with an idiot chemist.” 

Arthur said, “I’m not the one trying to use it. It’s being used against me.”

“Then walk away from the job,” Dom said immediately. 

“I can’t,” said Arthur. “I have to find some way to deal with this. Some…antidote or something.” 

There was a long moment of silence. Arthur thought Dom was also thinking about the antidote problem, but instead Dom said, “Don’t do something stupid, Arthur.” 

Arthur was confused because he almost never did stupid things and Dom knew that. “What?” 

“Eames is in trouble, isn’t he? You don’t take jobs that you can’t walk away from, and you’re so clean you squeak. So if you’re trapped by some kind of blackmail situation, it’s Eames who’s trapped, not you.” 

“We’re not trapped,” Arthur protested futilely, “we’re—”

“So I’m telling you not to do some stupid, self-sacrificing act because of the fact that you’re hopelessly in love with Eames.” 

Which rendered Arthur absolutely, utterly silent. 

“Do you hear me?” Dom demanded. “I’d tell him afterward that you did it all for him, and then he’d feel incredibly guilty for the rest of his life.” 

Arthur stammered, “I’m not— I didn’t—”

“Arthur, really.” Dom’s voice was impatient and exasperated. “You’ve been in love with him since Rio. I thought maybe it was just some kind of dazzled crush, but no, trust you to be as steadfast in who you choose to fall in love with as you are with everything else, and I’m offended that you really seemed to think I wouldn’t notice.” 

Arthur felt hot with humiliation, which was not exactly a feeling he was accustomed to these days. “Who else knows?” he asked, horrified at this revelation, feeling his entire carefully constructed world tumbling down around him. 

“No one,” Dom said. “If people knew, they’d be using him against you constantly. Which is obviously why you keep it a secret, but I don’t know why you kept it a secret from _me_.” Dom sounded petulant. 

“I…” said Arthur helplessly. Because Arthur knew everything about Dom, had been privy to every single breakdown of his marriage, and had never once shared with him that he was in love with Eames. He had told Mal, once, drunkenly, not really coming right out and saying it but beating around the bush, and he knew she had understood and apparently she’d kept the secret. Arthur had one of those moments where he missed her so much it hurt. He said, “It’s so stupid. Everyone falls in love with Eames.” It was why he’d told Mal and only Mal. Mal wouldn’t pity him. Mal would ooh and aah over the additional love in the world because Mal was French. Mal wouldn’t consider it unrequited, she’d consider it slow-moving. Mal and her firm belief in happy endings, and look how that had turned out. 

And Dom laughed. Arthur’s most precious secret, and Dom _laughed_. “Oh, Arthur, you think that because you’re in love with him, and when you’re in love with someone you think everyone must be, you can’t imagine how everyone isn’t. But trust me: everyone is _not_ in love with Eames. I know of seventeen large bounties on his head just thinking back over it now. I’m sure I could recall a few dozen more if I really thought about it.” 

Great. Dom had told him his dreamshare was a disaster and there was nothing he could do about it, pulled out of him the fact that he was in love with Eames, and now was running over the likelihood that one of Eames’s stupid, fucking slip-ups would eventually catch up with him and kill him. Like Arthur didn’t spend enough of his life worrying about that, like Arthur hadn’t personally taken care of a couple of the threats just to improve Eames’s odds. 

“Now,” Dom continued, as if all this had not just happened, “promise me you won’t do anything to sacrifice yourself to save Eames. You’re better with Eames than you are without him, and you know it. Stick with him, get the job done, come out for a visit. Promise me, Arthur.” 

Arthur looked bleakly out John’s bedroom window at the London street below and said, “Yeah. I promise.”


	22. Chapter 22

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The theme for this chapter is [this song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHMx5xbejz8). Which probably gives away what happens in this chapter. And typing that definitely gave away what happens in this chapter. Let's put this way: there are lots of run-on sentences in this chapter.

Chapter 22

“I suppose I should make tea,” offered John, resigned to the interrupted sleep, “and then you lot can clarify what’s going on.” John went into the kitchen, busying himself. 

He heard Eames in the sitting room say, “You drink a lot of tea, don’t you?” 

Sherlock said, “I’m not worried about Somnacin side effects.” 

“Ignore him!” John shouted to Eames. 

“No, ignore _him_!” retorted Sherlock petulantly. 

Eames’s voice was honeyed with amusement as he said, “I’m going to sell my story to the tabloids on the two of you. ‘Working with the Great Holmes and Watson.’ If people only knew the clever level of banter that you so consistently maintain.” 

“I can handle the Somnacin. I can even handle Moriarty if everyone would stop being an idiot. I should have been Mycroft’s first call, not _you_.” 

“I’m not going to debate you on my lack of desire to be Mycroft’s first call for anything ever again,” said Eames.

John sighed at the tea as he made it and thought how he could have told Eames how pointless the entire conversation was. Sherlock was going to sulk, and John was going to have to be the voice of reason, and eventually he’d end up calling Lestrade to go for pints just to get out of the miasma of Sherlock’s pouting. 

When he got back out into the sitting room, somehow Eames seemed to be telling Sherlock about American football. Sherlock looked properly horrified at this topic of conversation. John took note of this as a useful means to shut Sherlock up in the future. 

“Now tell me what’s going on,” John said, delivering the cups of tea. 

Eames took his and took a sip and said, “After the whole situation here, I got in touch with a chemist I know about the assertion that Somnacin can be made more effective. He got pretty worked up over the entire idea and told us to stop our chemist immediately.” Eames shrugged. 

Sherlock stared at him. “So that’s it? Based on some hysterical email from some disreputable chemist—”

“Careful now, the best people I know are disreputable,” said Eames mildly. 

“—you’re going to stop me from making an enormous breakthrough with Moriarty?” finished Sherlock. 

“It’s not a breakthrough if it kills us in the process, is it?” asked Eames pointedly. 

“Well, I don’t care,” Sherlock sniffed. 

“Well, I do,” rejoined Eames. 

“Does anyone care what I think?” asked John, annoyed. 

“No,” Sherlock snapped at him. “You don’t get any say. You’re not going in people’s heads and no one is going in yours.” 

John set his jaw and glared at him. “Oh, and that means that I must not have any stake in a situation where _you might get yourself killed_?” 

Sherlock snorted as if John was being melodramatic and waved his hand about. “You’d be fine.” 

John wanted to shout _What makes you think that?_ at Sherlock. He didn’t understand how Sherlock could believe even for a second that John wouldn’t fall to pieces without him. But he supposed this was not a conversation to have in front of Eames, who had already read John’s relationship with Sherlock entirely wrong. 

So John just turned to Eames, who was watching him shrewdly and knowingly, and said, “So who’s Arthur talking to now?” 

“His dreamshare boyfriend,” Eames answered. 

“No, he’s not,” Sherlock cut in swiftly. 

Eames rolled his eyes a bit. “Fine, if you’re going to be pedantic about it, I suppose it’s his dreamshare _partner_. Either way, he’s been in the business for a while and if anyone knows the straight story about the tweaked Somnacin, it’ll be him.” 

There were, on cue, footsteps on the stairs, but Arthur didn’t walk into the sitting room. He walked straight into the kitchen and began emptying every flask and vial and beaker down the sink. Sherlock made a sound of great distress and hurried into the kitchen. 

“What are you _doing_?” he demanded, trying to stop Arthur. 

Arthur turned with a movement so swift that no one could react before Arthur had Sherlock pinned against the wall, blinking down at him in astonishment. 

“Whatever training you’ve had, let’s just agree I’m better and let’s not settle this that way, hmm?” Arthur suggested politely. 

Sherlock looked mutinous “I don’t think—”

Arthur twisted his hand a bit, which cut Sherlock off in wide-eyed pain, and John was suddenly by Arthur’s side, without having made a conscious decision to go there. 

“Let him go,” he said quietly, which meant that he was two breaths away from forcing Arthur away from Sherlock violently. 

Arthur said, “I’m getting rid of the Somnacin. Every drop of it. Because if I just tell you to stop, you won’t, will you? You’ll keep going. And you need to stop. Because do you know what happens to people who fuck with Somnacin the way you are? They go crazy and kill everyone around them, and then themselves.” 

Sherlock blinked once. John looked from Arthur to Sherlock to the Somnacin on the table. And acknowledged Arthur’s very good point. 

“Eames, get rid of the Somnacin,” Arthur said evenly, not shifting his attention from Sherlock. 

“I’ll help,” John offered, and ignored Sherlock’s clear glare of _traitor!_ being directed at him over Arthur’s restraining arm. 

Together, John and Eames poured every chemical compound in the kitchen down the sink. 

Eames remarked, “That was a lot of money down the drain. Arthur must really like you.” 

Arthur let go of Sherlock and straightened his jumper a bit. “I just don’t like fatalities on my jobs,” he said lightly. 

Sherlock glared and bit out, “That was _unnecessary_.” 

“I’m not fucking around here, Sherlock,” Arthur snarled at him. “I’ve seen dreamsharing drive people insane, and it’s a terrible thing to watch happen, and I’m not getting us in the middle of it.” 

“Moriarty’s been using it and he’s—”

“Liable to shoot all of us and then himself,” John interrupted steadily. “Just like Arthur said.” 

“You’ll never defeat Moriarty without me,” Sherlock bit out. 

“I’ve somehow managed to carry out every single job of my life without you,” Arthur said stonily. “I think I’ll manage this one as well.” And then Arthur marched out of the flat. 

They listened to his footsteps on the stairs, and then Eames said, “I suppose that’s my cue.” 

“You should talk some sense into him,” Sherlock snapped at Eames. 

“I only ever talk _nonsense_ to Arthur; Arthur is the one with the sense, don’t you know?” 

“You’re both idiots,” Sherlock fumed. “You’re both _such idiots_.”

“Only me—” began Eames. 

“No,” Sherlock cut him off sharply, and John looked at him in surprise, because there was something unusual about his tone that John couldn’t place. “You are _both_ idiots. Both of you. Both of you throwing everything away, when you could actually _have_ it.” 

Eames stared at him. “I…Is this about the Somnacin? Because we—” 

“You should just _tell him_ ,” Sherlock spat out. “It would be fine, you know.” 

Eames blinked at him for a very long moment, and John looked between them, trying to determine what was really going on. Them Eames turned to John and said tightly, “Thanks for the tea.” 

Sherlock huffed his way out into the sitting room. 

John said distractedly to Eames, “Yeah, no problem.” He tried to focus for a moment longer on the problem he was aware of—the Moriarty issue—and not whatever that whole exchange had just been about. “What’s your next move now, with Moriarty?” 

“Arthur will formulate a plan. Arthur’s brilliant when it comes to plans.” Eames said it lightly, but John thought it sounded a bit forced.

“Right,” he said, hoping his skepticism about this didn’t come across. This whole thing, he thought, was a catastrophe, and Mycroft was so stupid not to just cut his losses and lock Moriarty up and throw away the key. “What was all that about just now?” 

“Nothing,” answered Eames shortly, and left. 

John, after a moment, turned and went into the sitting room, where Sherlock was curled up into a tight ball on the sofa. John, used to such things, would have ignored him as he had during so many other previous sulks, except that he wasn’t sure he knew everything there was to know about what was happening here. “Sherlock, what was all that about? What’s going on here? You need to tell me everything.” 

Sherlock said, “I know something. About the two of them.” 

“Something…?” John echoed, perplexed. 

“If I told them. I mean, really told them. All of it. Just one of them. Should I tell them?” 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Something what? Something dangerous? Are they in danger?” 

Sherlock sighed. “No, they’re…No.” There was a long moment of silence. Then Sherlock said, “I don’t know. Maybe sometimes it’s better not to tell.” 

John cocked his head at the bundle of Sherlock on the sofa and thought that he sounded indecisive and that sounded unlike Sherlock. “You okay?” he asked. 

And Sherlock sighed heavily again, but said, “Yes. Fine. Never mind. Go away.” 

***

Arthur was plainly exhausted. 

Eames watched him as he dropped into the taxi with him. He didn’t slump or lean or anything overt like that. He sat perfectly straight, with his beautiful posture, and he looked at London going by. His face was drawn tight, his lips pressed together in a thin line. Eames wanted to enfold him, because clearly Arthur was worrying. 

He said, “We just have to avoid letting Moriarty get close enough to use his Somnacin. We’ve done stuff like this before, played hide-and-seek with the mark.” 

“Gas masks,” Arthur said, without looking away from the window. “It’s the only thing I can think of. Because Sherlock was drugging us the whole time in the dream, it’s how he got to both of us. So. Gas masks.” Arthur rubbed at his forehead. Eames tried to think if he’d ever seen Arthur do that before. 

Eames tried to think if he’d ever seen Arthur look so _worried_ before. Arthur was the one who handled pressure. Arthur was the one who told the rest of them to calm down. He could be unrelentingly demanding of the people on his team, but he didn’t crack. 

But normally Arthur had something to _do_ in these situations. Indeed, normally Arthur was the one doing the most in these situations. And now he was just sitting in a cab worrying. 

And Eames didn’t know what to do about that. 

Eames looked out his window. It had started raining, and the lights reflected in the puddles all around. Eames thought of the doubt evident in both John and Sherlock that they would be able to get out of Moriarty’s head intact. He thought of Arthur and his silent worry next to him. Eames thought of the chemists that had apparently shot their entire teams. He thought of Mal, losing her grip on reality and condemning her husband to hell in the process. He thought of showing up in Sarah Miller’s head with Arthur already tied up, incapacitated, at a disadvantage, and how the gas mask idea was only going to work if Moriarty didn’t pounce on both of them immediately, and that seemed like a distinct possibility. 

Eames thought of Sherlock. _You should just tell him._

All of these things pressed heavily into Eames’s head, so much so that he found himself having to close his eyes to try to center himself. They should make a run for it, he thought. Fuck Mycroft and his sodding blackmail, they should take off, him and Arthur. They should flip the blackmail tables, find something on Mycroft instead. Maybe Sherlock would even help them. What they shouldn’t do was finish this job. 

The cab stopped and Arthur paid and Eames opened his eyes and watched the transaction. Then he followed Arthur out of the cab and into the hotel and over to the lifts. He didn’t say a word as they stood on the lift together and waited for it to take them up to their penthouse. He didn’t say, _Let’s just go. Let’s disappear somewhere, just you and I. Let’s take ourselves off the map, find a tucked-away corner in some tucked-away city in some part of the world where no one will ever find us_. Everything froze in his throat, the impact of all of it, the crystallization of saying it all out loud. 

But all the same, Arthur stepped off the lift and into the lobby and Eames stepped off next to him, and then Eames reached for him, no conscious decision-making, just reaching for him and pulling him in and up to him and kissing him, sloppy, messy, urgent. And if Eames had stopped to think about it, he would have cursed the lack of finesse in the kiss, but Eames didn’t stop to think about it because Arthur kissed him back immediately. Not even a moment of reaction time. Arthur kissed him as if he’d been expecting it, as if they always walked into rooms and fell on top of each other, as if it was their usual greeting. Arthur kissed him as if they’d kissed a million times before and would kiss a million times afterward and the momentary fumbling of teeth didn’t matter because it was one blip on a lifetime of kisses. 

Arthur kissed him. 

And Eames backed him against the wall blindly and kissed him harder and harder, determined to try to get his fill before Arthur came to his senses and pushed him away. But Arthur kept kissing him back, calling his bet every time he deepened the kiss, raising it even, and two things occurred to Eames’s fuzzy mind: One, that he was never going to get his fill of kissing Arthur. And two, that Arthur apparently had no intention of pushing him away. That Arthur, in fact, was trying desperately to pull him impossibly closer, like they weren’t flush up against each other, no room for breath, so close together that Eames couldn’t even get any friction because the angle was too close and all wrong. 

Eames didn’t draw back from Arthur because everyone who’d ever wanted him dead could have walked off the lift behind him at that moment and he wouldn’t have drawn back from Arthur. But he did move his mouth just far enough away to mumble, “I have a terrible idea.” 

Arthur kissed him again, with a desperate gasping sound as if not kissing Eames was going to suffocate him, and Eames actually shuddered with it. When Arthur spoke, it was so much into Eames’s mouth that Eames thought he must be gaining his understanding of the words through osmosis. “Does this idea involve the fact that we’re most likely going to lose our minds in the next few days and so we may as well fuck a lot until then?” He asked it in one desperate pant before recapturing Eames’s mouth. 

“Yes, actually,” managed Eames. 

“You’re a genius,” said Arthur, and shoved him away before also pulling him back in, but now they were walking forward—or backward in Eames’s case—and there was still a kiss going on but it was happening around stilted steps and clothing being shed. 

“Am I?” Eames asked. “Really? Can you make a note of that in your notebook? That you said that to me?” 

“Shut up,” Arthur said without heat, and shoved at his own jeans. “Your problem is you never know when to shut up.”

“We haven’t reached the shutting up portion of the evening yet,” Eames told him, and regarded the pinstripes on Arthur’s underpants. “Please, please, _please_ tell me you coordinate your underpants with your ties.”

Arthur grinned at him. Arthur _grinned_ at him, dimples set to stun, and Eames felt light-headed, and surely that was partly because of the rush of blood out of his brain, but probably it was mostly because this was how you felt when you were on the verge of shagging the person you’d fantasized about for ages and he wasn’t just shagging you, he was _smiling_ at you, the way your fantasies had always gone, and Eames felt dizzy enough that he stopped moving, stopped kissing, stopped undressing, drew to a halt halfway through the bedroom door. 

Arthur’s grin slowly faded, and he said hesitantly, “Eames?” as if he expected Eames to suddenly say, _Why aren’t you dressed? Put your clothing on. What were we thinking?_ “If you think—”

“I don’t think,” Eames said suddenly, urgently, and reached to pull Arthur in. “I never think,” Eames said, and closed his hands into Arthur’s hair, dipped his head to bite at Arthur’s collarbone. Arthur swore and Eames said, “ _Arthur_ ,” to remind himself of who it was. 

And Arthur said, “Yes,” a little breathlessly, as if he knew that Eames needed the reminder. 

“Arthur,” Eames repeated, and pressed his nose into the hollow of Arthur’s throat, felt his blood thrumming through his veins, thought of the vulnerability of Arthur with his jugular exposed and the fact that Arthur was trembling all over and that wasn’t fear, that was arousal, and Eames bit at him again, feeling ridiculously possessive considering the fact that neither one of them was even completely naked yet. 

“Fuck,” said Arthur, definitely breathlessly this time, and then, “I don’t approve of the biting.” 

Which amused Eames. Trust Arthur to make him work in bed as hard as he made him work out of it. “Yes, you do,” he said knowingly, and then swept Arthur’s legs out from under him, landing them in a heap on the floor, which he had only been able to do because of how very distracted Arthur had been by how very much he approved of the biting. 

Arthur glared up at him. “The bed is that way,” he said, and moved his kiss-wrecked head in the vague direction of the bed. 

Eames couldn’t help but grin at him. His Arthur, looking so hot and so disgruntled all at once. “Beds are overrated.” 

“They definitely are not,” glowered Arthur. 

“Darling, I think you’ve been leading a very boring sex life. Let me rectify that for you.” 

“See, this is what I mean about your inability to shut up. Your mouth should so be fucking occupied with other things right now.” 

“No need to say such romantic things, petal, I promise you, I’m a sure thing.” 

“I fucking hate you,” Arthur told him, then tackled him over onto his back and straddled him and kissed the absolute life out of him. 

It was the opposite of the way you kissed a person you hated, was the thought that vaguely tried to form in Eames’s head, except that Arthur was busy kissing him in just that way and Eames groaned and destroyed Arthur’s hair and couldn’t even pull enough thought together to kiss him back properly. He was being completely and utterly undone by nothing more complicated than a _kiss_ , but it was all about who was doing the kissing. Eames had known, had always known, that he would be lost forever if he ever let himself have Arthur, and he hadn’t even had him yet and the depths to which he was lost were terrifying. Eames thought he was never going to be able to kiss anyone ever again for the rest of his life, because nobody was ever going to kiss him the way _Arthur_ was kissing him. 

“Your fucking mouth,” Arthur murmured at him thickly, drugging him with slow, heavy kisses. “You never stop talking—and you say such ridiculous things—and I would stare at your _fucking mouth_ —and just want to splay you under me—and kiss you—and kiss you—and kiss you—until you couldn’t say anything but _more_.” 

And Eames was willing to say _more_ , Eames was willing to beg for _more_ , but some part of his brain was still functioning, some part that made him say, “Is that true? That’s not true.” Because he couldn’t wrap his mind around the idea that the entire time he’d been flailing around in sexual frustration over Arthur, Arthur had been having the same ideas about him. 

Arthur stopped kissing him. Arthur looked down at him, and they hadn’t turned on lights, so his face was in shadow, and only his eyes were catching a bit of light, sending his lashes into silhouette. “Of course it’s true,” he said. 

“But I would have noticed…” said Eames. “I never noticed…”

“I’m a better bluffer than you,” Arthur said, after a second. 

Eames stared up at him and wished he could see him more clearly and was grateful Arthur couldn’t see _him_ more clearly and wanted to turn this thought over in his head, but Arthur was mostly naked and Eames was mostly naked and Arthur was sprawled over him and Eames decided there would be time for everything else but right now there were more pressing matters. “Arthur,” he said hoarsely. “More.” 

And Arthur gave him more. Arthur kissed and kissed, licked and sucked, breathed and bit. Arthur took off Eames’s pants with his _teeth_ , giving Eames a kind of playful eyebrow-waggle as he did it, and the part of Eames that wasn’t killed by that was killed by Arthur’s mouth, which cajoled and then teased until Eames shuddered and then writhed and then blindly begged and when the white light of the climax receded, Eames heard the imprint of whatever he’d shouted lingering in the air over him. 

He pushed Arthur off of him, onto his back, and loomed over him, and said, “I am really, seriously going to shut up now.” 

And he did. And so did Arthur, at first. Arthur was the world’s politest blowjob recipient, and Eames supposed he should have expected nothing less, so Eames pushed him. Eames pushed until Arthur’s hands were tight fists in Eames’s hair and his breaths were gasping groans of half-formed words and Eames focused on not choking because Eames wanted to make Arthur fucking _scream_. 

Eames squeezed his eyes shut, and Arthur’s hands were a painful twist on his head, and he thought, _Please, God, let him say my name. Let him know it’s me, and no one else_.

Arthur’s climax was a wordless shout, but when he’d settled back to earth, when Eames licked lazy lines of sweat off of Arthur’s stomach and Arthur’s hands pulled with uncoordinated good intentions through Eames’s damp hair, pushing it off of Eames’s forehead, he panted, “Fucking _Christ_ , Eames,” which was good enough for Eames. 

“Mmm,” Eames hummed in agreement, far too exhausted for anything more strenuous. He dropped his head onto Arthur’s ribcage and thought, _This is Arthur underneath you. That is his heart beating_. Eames closed his eyes and let it beat there, safe in Arthur, and used it to count his still-heaving breaths. 

“If you fucking fall asleep on top of me,” threatened Arthur. 

Eames wasn’t feeling inclined to believe any threat out of Arthur at the moment. “What will you do to punish me?” Eames asked, too tired to even put any effort into the double entendre. 

“We should be in bed. This is why beds aren’t overrated. You’re going to fall asleep on top of me on this scratchy, uncomfortable carpet.”

Eames rubbed his head against Arthur’s chest. “Christ, you’re grouchy for someone who just had an earth-shattering orgasm.” 

“It was okay,” said Arthur. “Let’s not get carried away.” 

Eames made a protesting noise that sounded embarrassingly like a squawk and lifted his head up to frown at Arthur. 

And Arthur wriggled out from under him and said, “Knew it. Surest way to energize you is always to insult your ego.” And then Arthur retreated to the bed. 

“You’re such a terrible person,” grumbled Eames, dragging himself up and over to the bed. “You’re a ruiner of afterglow, you know.” 

“I have that on my business cards,” said Arthur. 

“I bet you do. Right under ‘Three Michelin stars.’”

“Three?” 

“Did you actually give yourself four, you arrogant prat?” Eames collapsed into the bed next to Arthur. 

“Are you getting into bed with me? Really?” asked Arthur. 

Eames froze, his face half-smushed into the pillow, and wondered if Arthur thought he ought to sleep on the couch. _Mutual blowjobs are all well and good, but let’s not get carried away._

“I thought beds were overrated,” continued Arthur, and Eames relaxed. Slowly. 

“Fuck off,” he mumbled into the pillow. 

“Not how you use that code word,” said Arthur. 

Eames moved suddenly to turn the bedside lamp on and then turned to look at Arthur, blinking in the sudden brightness. 

“What the hell,” Arthur complained. 

Eames leaned forward and pressed a thumb to each of Arthur’s dimples. Arthur, in bed with him, post-coital and _teasing_ him. Eames smiled at him. “Just checking,” he said, and when he went to sleep, it was right there in that bed.


	23. Chapter 23

Chapter 23

Eames slept with an arm casually flung over Arthur, heavy and possessive, as if to keep him in place. Arthur lay underneath its weight and tried not to panic. It wasn’t panic over Eames being cuddly and possessive in bed. It was panic over Eames _not meaning_ to be cuddly and possessive in bed. Because Arthur had, after all those careful years of keeping Eames at arm’s length, gone and done _this_ , and now Arthur was aware that he was never going to be able to walk away. He was going to be an undignified mess over how much he wanted to keep Eames forever. 

Eames snored a bit next to him, and Arthur tried to imagine ever sleeping next to anyone else ever again, tried to imagine anyone else’s hands on him, anyone else’s mouth. Arthur had always been alarmingly fixated on Eames, but now this was all so much _worse_. 

Eames snuffled, cutting off his snoring, and muttered something unintelligible into his pillow. Arthur wondered if he was dreaming. 

And then blinked in astonishment. _Wondered if he was dreaming_. How, in the middle of the marvel of Eames pressing him up against a wall and kissing him, was this the first time it had occurred to him to check his totem? 

His totem was in the other room, in the pocket of his discarded jeans, so Arthur slid carefully out from underneath Eames’s arm. 

Which still managed to wake Eames, of course. He mumbled, “Darling?” 

“Yes,” Arthur assured him. “Just me.” 

“Where’re you going?” Eames asked blearily. 

“Getting a drink,” Arthur lied. “Be right back.” 

Eames grunted in what Arthur supposed was acceptance of this explanation, and in a moment he began snoring again. Arthur looked down at him and refused to give in to his very strong desire to get back into bed and kiss along every single one of Eames’s tattoos. Instead, Arthur tiptoed out of the room and into the living area. He used the light that was still on in the bedroom to locate his jeans and pull his totem out of his pocket, and then he rolled it twice on the coffee table. 

Four, each time. 

So…reality. That meant this was reality. Which was…surely impossible. He must be dreaming. Dreams had been tricky and disconcerting lately. This was doubtless just another trick. 

Eames’s voice called from the bedroom, sounding much more awake than he had before. “Are you checking your totem?”

“Don’t get smug about it,” Arthur shot back, and rolled it again. Still four. 

“I’m not. What’s it telling you?” 

“That this is reality.” Arthur walked into the bedroom, still holding his die, and regarded Eames, sprawled out in the bed. Eames, naked, with sheets tangled around his legs, with his tattoos on full and blatant display, with his hair a mess and his mouth still swollen from kissing and his chest still red from the rasp of Arthur’s stubble over it as he’d kissed it. And with a space in the bed next to him that he expected Arthur to fit into. 

This couldn’t be reality, thought Arthur, trying not to stare at Eames too much. But it just _couldn’t_ be. This wasn’t how his reality went. In reality, Eames didn’t back him against walls and kiss him like he couldn’t go another minute without doing it. Eames didn’t suggest they have a lot of sex. Eames didn’t shout his name and curl his hands into his hair and shatter him. That was how his _dreams_ went. And dreams had been odd and tricky lately and Arthur didn’t care what his totem said, this _had_ to be a dream. 

“But you don’t believe it?” 

“Don’t be smug,” Arthur said again, because he knew how much he was giving away here. His suspicion that sex with Eames had to be a dream betrayed that he dreamed about sex with Eames. Arthur couldn’t imagine how much he’d already been giving away in his desperate, desire-drunk kisses. 

“I’m not,” Eames said again, then sat up, tangling the sheets more, and reached out his hand. “Let me see it.” 

And Arthur knew he shouldn’t, had had it endlessly drummed into him that he should never let anyone else touch his totem. But he walked over and placed it in Eames’s hand and tried not to be struck by how alarmingly intimate it felt to see it there. 

Eames’s fingers closed over it and he said, “Close your eyes.” 

Arthur did, and he heard Eames roll the die on the bedside table, and then Eames reported, “Four.” 

And Arthur supposed there was a possibility that this was just his projection of Eames and therefore of course Eames would know exactly what number to say the die had rolled to trick Arthur into thinking this was all real. But, at the same time, he wasn’t sure he cared about that. As long as Eames wasn’t some invading forgery, Arthur was okay with living in this dream with Eames’s projection for a little while. At least long enough for another round. 

And if something terrible happened next, then maybe it was all just a dream. What were the odds? 

Arthur opened his eyes and looked at Eames, whose eyebrows were lifted in inquiry. “Reality,” Arthur told him. 

“It’s clever, the die,” Eames said, and tossed it to him easily. 

But Arthur put it back on the bedside table, because he was naked and it wasn’t like he was going to take it into bed with him. 

“We can test my poker chip, if you want,” Eames offered. “It’s in my pocket.” 

Arthur, after a moment’s hesitation, decided to embrace the offered equalizing. He went back out into the living area and dug Eames’s poker chip out of his pocket, then carried it back into the bedroom. 

“What’s it say?” Eames asked him. 

Arthur glanced at it, then cocked an eyebrow at Eames. “‘Cassino’ with two s’s?”

“Reality,” Eames said, with a little smile, and stretched, looking very pleased with himself. 

Arthur put the poker chip down next to his die and thought how surprisingly well they fit together, as if all along they should have been on the same nightstand. 

And then Eames said, “What’s this one?” and skirted his hand along the scar on Arthur’s ribs.

Arthur glanced at it, trying to pretend that it wasn’t still shockingly arousing to have Eames’s hands on his skin. “Knife wound.” 

“Obviously.” 

“It was a back alley in Rangoon. Pouring rain.” 

Eames’s fingers drifted back and forth along the scar. He was frowning at it intently. “This was deep,” he remarked. “This was a close call.” 

“Not really,” said Arthur, attempting a little shrug, although it really had been.

“Is he dead now?” Eames asked, and Arthur knew he was talking about the man who had wielded the knife. 

“He was dead that night,” Arthur answered truthfully. 

“Good.” Eames mouthed wet kisses over the line of the scar, and Arthur wanted to tell him he was being ridiculous but was scared to open his mouth because he wasn’t sure what nonsense might spill out of it. Eames, meanwhile, pulled himself up to kneeling and kissed Arthur’s mouth, and Arthur concentrated on not falling to immediate shambles, because surely he should be growing used to kissing Eames by this point. 

“I’m going to make you tell me the story behind every single one of your scars,” Eames informed him, smiling. 

“Only if you reciprocate by telling me about your tattoos,” was what Arthur absolutely had not meant to say in response. 

Eames’s smile widened to a grin. “Deal. You know, it is an absolute shame that you’re naked right now.” 

“Is it? I was thinking it was an advantage.” 

Eames shook his head in mock chagrin. “There’s that boring sex life of yours rearing its head again.” 

“Eames,” said Arthur in exasperation, but then Eames tugged at him, and Arthur let himself go, let Eames tumble him onto the bed and roll over onto him. 

Eames said, “If you were dressed, I’d unwrap you like a present. I’d take you out of all that expensive cloth so slowly you’d be begging me for the filthiest things.” 

“Unwrap me like a present,” Arthur echoed, trying to sound sneering instead of breathless. “That’s your best line?”

Eames smirked down at him. His hair was tumbling over his eyes and his lips were simply obscene. He said, “Shut up, it’s working.” 

And it was, so Arthur said nothing in response. He looked at Eames and he thought about how he’d gotten to this position. He remembered every step along the way. It was just that he didn’t understand the _how_. 

And normally Arthur was the type of person who worried about things being too good to be true. Normally he was the type of person who viewed gift horses with suspicion, looked them straight in the mouth and refused to be baited. 

But Eames sprawled over him and grinned down at him and, when Arthur thought of doing anything other than pulling him closer and kissing him desperately, his heart lurched painfully. Arthur had been shot in the chest numerous times, but it was the idea of pushing Eames away from him that made his heart hurt. 

So Arthur pulled him in and kissed him. 

***

Eames woke to Arthur next to him, wide awake, lying on his back and fiddling with some sort of wire. He was disappointed not to have Arthur mashed up next to him, because the frighteningly possessive part of him would have enjoyed that, but he was satisfied enough to have Arthur still in bed, still naked, still deliciously rumpled practically beyond recognition. 

Eames gave a grunt that he meant to be of greeting but that he thought sounded more proudly smug at how well things were going so far. 

“Good morning,” Arthur said to him without looking, still frowning at the wire. 

Eames wanted him to frown at _him_. Well, he wanted him to smile at him but he’d take a frown if he had to. Eames would take _anything_ from Arthur, and that was alarming. He didn’t know if Arthur had been so dubious of the reality of the night before because it was too close to his dreams or if it was because it was so foreign to his way of thinking that he’d never contemplated it before. Although surely not the latter, since Arthur claimed to have spent their acquaintance fantasizing about his mouth. Eames had great difficulty believing that to be true. But Eames also didn’t think Arthur seemed like the type to tease him in that way while they were in bed together. 

Eames decided trying to untangle this was going to drive him insane, and that was apparently going to happen soon enough. 

So he just draped a heavy arm over Arthur’s chest and used it to leverage himself closer, settling his head into Arthur’s shoulder with a sleepy, sloppy kiss. Arthur didn’t protest, but he still kept doing whatever he was doing with the wire. 

Eames watched his hands for a little while, fascinated, and then said, “What are you _doing_?” 

“Fixing our phone so we can call down and order breakfast,” Arthur answered. “Mycroft broke it again.” 

Eames stared and stared at what Arthur was doing, and then said, “You are so _fucking hot_ when you engineer.” 

“Thank you,” Arthur said, sounding pleased, as if Eames had told him he was an excellent gardener or something. 

Eames couldn’t take it another moment. He pushed the wires off of Arthur and replaced them with himself and kissed Arthur until Arthur said his name like a pleading curse. 

So it was much, much later when Eames mumbled to him, “There’s something you should know.” 

He felt Arthur, who had been beautifully boneless with recent pleasure, tense under him. “Okay,” he agreed, clearly bracing himself. 

“I stole John’s phone last night. We can just use that to call room service.” 

There was a beat, and then Arthur laughed, sounding delighted and charmed, and Eames picked up his head and looked down at him and kissed his dimples. 

***

Sherlock was gearing up for a world-class sulk, and John wasn’t in the mood, because his mobile was missing. He used Sherlock’s mobile to call it and got nowhere. No ringing anywhere in the flat. 

“What did you do with it?” he demanded of Sherlock, sulk or no. 

Sherlock sighed heavily and mumbled into the back of the sofa. “Eames stole your mobile last night, obviously.” 

“He _stole_ my _mobile_?” 

“Well, he _is_ a professional thief, John,” Sherlock snapped testily. 

“But why would he steal my mobile?” 

“Because Mycroft confiscated theirs. And he’s a _professional thief_.” 

“Did you see him steal it and just let it go?” asked John, as he realized that that had to have been the case, because Sherlock missed nothing. 

Instead of answering, Sherlock turned over and glared at John and said, “I’m not a child. I was handling the Somnacin just fine.” 

“You’re a recovering drug addict, and it’s a drug, and also the professional thieves who had no qualms about stealing my phone had plenty of qualms about letting you work with it. So that’s good enough for me,” retorted John. 

“Without me,” said Sherlock darkly, “they’re going to get themselves killed.” 

“They’re good at what they do, supposedly, and they haven’t got themselves killed yet,” John pointed out. 

“This is Moriarty we’re talking about,” Sherlock countered. “Moriarty, who managed to wrestle you into Semtex. Tell me again that they’re not going to need help here.” 

“I’m not saying what they’re doing isn’t dangerous. I’m saying that bad things happen when _you_ get all caught up in Moriarty’s head. And this Somnacin is all about messing with your head. Do you understand that in the hierarchy of you and them, I choose _you_?” John asked impatiently. 

Sherlock blinked at him for a long moment of silence. 

John sighed. “I don’t want you to go insane. I don’t want you to do anything to jeopardize that head of yours. I don’t want you to do anything to jeopardize _you_. Why is that so difficult for you to believe? I do a lot of things to try to keep you safe. You should know this. Bearing the brunt of your sulk on this point doesn’t frighten me.” 

Sherlock continued to just stare at him. John had no idea what he was thinking. He sighed again and headed into the kitchen, where he made himself a cup of tea, his mind full of so many different thoughts that he couldn’t settle on one. 

When he walked back into the sitting room, Sherlock was up and typing furiously on his laptop, which was inconsistent with a sulk and so a good sign. 

“Ring your brother and tell him he has to retrieve my mobile for me,” John told Sherlock. 

Sherlock didn’t look up from his laptop as he said, “I’m ringing my brother for another reason entirely.” 

***

They had an actual, _bona fide_ debate over whether Arthur had to get dressed to receive the room service. 

Arthur said, “I can’t believe we’re having a debate about this. When I say that you’re fucking annoying? This is what I mean.” 

“You don’t have all the relevant information,” Eames told him. “Let me give you my arguments with specificity.” 

“All the relevant information is that people wear _clothing_ , Eames.” 

“Exhibit A,” Eames said. “This.” He waved a hand over Arthur where Arthur was sprawled next to him on the bed. 

“What the hell does that even mean?” 

“ _This. You. Your body_. If you knew what you looked like, you’d never cover yourself up.” 

“You’re being ridiculous,” Arthur said. 

“You blush _all over_ ,” Eames replied, voice low with fascination. 

“Stop it.” Arthur squirmed, embarrassed, but Eames held him still. 

“You gorgeous work of art, you,” Eames breathed, his gaze tracing over what Arthur assumed was the full-body blush he was horrifyingly wearing at the moment. 

“Shut up,” said Arthur, and he was pretty sure he was blushing even harder. 

“Magnificent,” murmured Eames into Arthur’s chest. 

“Thanks,” said Arthur awkwardly, because he’d never slept with anyone before who had called him a magnificent work of art and he had no idea how he was expected to react to that. “But I’ve got to go get dressed now so I can get our room service.” He said it but he still closed his hands into Eames’s thoroughly wrecked hair in what he couldn’t even pretend wasn’t encouragement. 

“Hush now,” Eames said into Arthur’s abdomen. “I’ll do all the work.” 

“I’ll just lie back and think of England?” drawled Arthur. 

“How many of us English boys have you fucked?” asked Eames lazily, his tongue tracing over Arthur’s hipbone. 

“Just you,” Arthur admitted. 

“Then yes, by all means, lie back and think a lot about England,” Eames rejoined. 

Arthur sighed and kicked Eames a bit. 

Eames said, “You want to watch it, given the close proximity of my teeth to certain parts of your anatomy.” 

“I have to _get dressed_ ,” Arthur insisted, but he arched up into Eames’s mouth anyway and said thickly, resigned, “Fuck.” 

“Well put, darling,” said Eames. 

“If you’re going to do it, _do it_ ,” said Arthur. 

Eames gave him a look that said, _Like I can’t completely take you apart in record time_. And then proceeded to completely take him apart in record time. And while Arthur was panting on the bed and wondering if you could actually die from sex being too good, the elevator dinged and someone called out, “Room service!” 

Eames gave him a quick kiss that nevertheless managed to be filthy enough to make Arthur’s orgasm-heavy brain slosh a bit, then called out, “Coming!” and winked at Arthur, looking pleased as punch. 

“Christ,” Arthur complained, trying to sound annoyed around heaving breaths. “Don’t be smug about that double entendre, that was the world’s laziest double entendre.” 

Eames gave him a beamingly amused smile as he pulled on a pair of sweatpants and then said, “Not why I’m smug,” before giving Arthur another one of those head-clearing kisses he specialized in. And then he darted out of the room and Arthur heard him charming the room service person. 

Arthur’s head was a terrible mess of overloaded pleasure points and screaming-hoarse panic points. He felt like his heart rate had been accelerated from the moment Eames had pressed him against the wall, half the time from an overwhelming sensation of _yes_ and the other half from an overwhelming sensation of _no_. Arthur wanted to retreat, to flee. He briefly considered locking himself in the bathroom, hiding in the shower, letting the sex and the intimacy wash off of him and when he came back out this weird alternate reality he was living in would have closed and he could get back to the life he understood. 

Instead, he heard Eames’s laughter from the other room. It was Eames’s fake laughter, calculated to be light and alluring. It was nothing like how Eames laughed when Arthur made him laugh, that delighted, un-self-conscious belly laugh Eames had that twisted all of Arthur’s organs up and diverted the path of his blood. A craving for the sound of Eames’s real laugh slammed into Arthur with the force of a freight train—and Arthur had been hit by freight trains. It was as bad as a drug, Arthur thought. It was _worse_. He almost whimpered with how much he wanted Eames to come back to bed and smile at him and laugh when he did stupid things as if Arthur was clever and charming. 

So Arthur didn’t move from the bed. Arthur figured he might as well jump into his own damnation with both eyes open. He was past the point of no return now. He was going to enjoy every fucking second of it until the moment Eames left.


	24. Chapter 24

Chapter 24

They ate in bed. This was Eames’s idea, because Eames was terrified that Arthur might come to his senses if Eames let him out of bed. Eames wanted to delay Arthur coming to his senses for as long as he possibly could. He was going to attempt to keep Arthur naked and in bed for the foreseeable future. If he thought he could do it for the rest of their lives, he would. And so far Arthur was complying. Arthur muttered something like, “This is _ridiculous_ ,” but Arthur also propped up his pillow and settled his plate of omelet on his lap, cutting it primly into pieces. 

Eames watched him and mopped up yolk with a piece of toast and tried to come up with something witty to say, something that would distract Arthur, keep him from saying, _Well, this was fun, but we should get to work, shouldn’t we?_

Arthur said, concentrating on his omelet, “How’d you know about the engineering?” 

Eames had no idea what he was talking about. “Sorry?” 

“The engineering.” Arthur glanced at him before taking a bite. “How’d you know?” 

“I…don’t know what you’re talking about,” Eames admitted. 

“Before, you said that I was, you know, attractive when I was engineering.” 

“Attractive?” Eames cocked an eyebrow at him, amused at the red tips of his ears. “I believe I said you were—”

“I paraphrased,” Arthur informed him.

Eames grinned. “You were doing the little engineering bit right in front of me, fiddling around with that wire. It was hot.”

Arthur looked at him steadily enough that Eames said, confused, “What?”

“You really don’t know. You just happened to choose that word.” 

“Arthur, darling, I love a bit of mystery as much as the next person, but I don’t know—”

“You said I was engineering. So I thought you knew. That I was going to be an engineer.” 

Eames was stunned momentarily speechless by this unprecedented tidbit of personal information. It shimmered in the air between them, crystalline and delicate. Eames swallowed and tried to think how to respond so as not to scare Arthur out of this sharing mood. “Oh,” he said, and then thought sarcastically, _Yeah, brilliant response, glad you came up with that._

Arthur smiled at him, a small smile, just a hint of dimples. 

Eames struggled to say something halfway intelligent. “What kind of engineer?” 

Arthur answered, “I never decided between mechanical and electrical.” 

“Why didn’t you ever decide?”

“Because I dropped out of college before I had to decide.” 

“Why did you drop out of college?” Eames felt like he was pushing his luck with the number of questions he was asking, but he also felt greedy, wanted as much of Arthur as Arthur was willing to give him.

“Because I got involved in dreamsharing,” Arthur answered simply, focused on his omelet. 

Eames considered, then went for broke. “How?” He’d discovered over the years that no one really knew how Arthur had got involved in dreamsharing. Arthur’s origin stories were the stuff of legend. Eames had laughed himself silly over many an outlandish tale. 

Arthur said, “I had a job in a coffee shop,” and Eames had definitely never heard this one before. “The best coffee shop in Iowa City.”

“Lot of competition for that title in Iowa City, is there?” Eames couldn’t resist asking. 

“Have you ever been to Iowa City?”

“That one’s still on my bucket list.” 

“Then you have no valid opinions on Iowa City.” 

“All this time, I thought you were this true romantic in love with Paris, when in fact it’s Iowa City with its teeth in your heart.”

“Do you want to hear this story or not?” Arthur asked, sounding fondly exasperated (although maybe that was in Eames’s head). 

“I want to hear the story. Tell me. Coffee shop, Iowa City, you. See, Iowa City’s already sounding better.” 

Arthur rolled his eyes, and Eames loved so much when Arthur did that that he had to bite his tongue to keep himself from rolling onto Arthur and devouring him. “Mal came in one day. She had a job nearby. You know Mal. She was _Mal_. She was like nothing else in Iowa City. She was _French_. She was so exotic I couldn’t stand it. She came in almost every day and I made her all of these ridiculous coffee drinks to try to impress her and by the end of the week she said, ‘Arthur. You are bored here, no? You are made for bigger things, brighter lights, places where the laws of physics are mere suggestions and you can design all the logic you wish.’” Arthur fell silent, looking a little wistful, clearly seeing a time and a place so far away that the primary occupant—Mal—was no longer around to remember it with him. 

After a second, Eames ventured carefully, “Is that a paraphrase?” 

Arthur shook himself out of his introspection and refocused on Eames, smiling a little. “No, that was a direct quote. I will never forget that because it changed my life.” 

“Christ, she knew you, didn’t she? After one week. You’ve got to be the only person ever seduced into dreamsharing with the promise of _logic_.” 

“Mal read people well.” Arthur put his finished plate on the nightstand and slid down, propping himself onto his elbow. He looked as if he was settling into position on his half of the bed, and Eames was pleased at that. “She thought you two were kindred spirits, you know. She was the one always pushing for you in the early days. Dom and I would moan and complain about you, and Mal would wax poetic about your artistic temperament and your commitment to the role. It was all nonsense.” 

“Clearly she just had a good eye,” sniffed Eames, around his flash of regret. Because he had known Mal professionally but he had never been close to her, not the way he had known Arthur was even before he had known this background bit, and now he was sorry that he would never get the chance, had never known that she had even liked him. 

Arthur smiled at him, which derailed all of Eames’s thoughts for a second. 

“So she said, ‘Come with me, we’ll do great things together,’ and you went?” said Eames eventually. 

Arthur was silent for a second. He rolled onto his back and thought. And just as Eames was starting to worry he wouldn’t answer, he said, simply, “Yes.” There was another long silence, and Eames was just about to shift the conversational topic when Arthur said, “I wanted out so badly. All my life, I’d wanted out. And I think I was just finally tired of feeling guilty about it. She was from Paris. The Paris of my dreams. I took it as a sign. I did my first dreamshare and I was fucking useless, but it was like opening a door and finding your favorite chair already sitting in the living room. Mal took me to Paris that very night.” 

Eames looked at Arthur, smiling up at the ceiling at the recollection, clearly lost in that time when Mal had still been Mal and not a dream-twisted version of herself. He said, “So you knew Mal first.” Because he’d never heard an origin story get that right. 

Arthur nodded. “I was Mal’s friend. Mal knew Dom, and I met Dom through her. Mal was totally smitten with Dom. It was love at first sight for those two. I can’t tell you how much time I spent listening to her swoon over Dom Cobb.” 

“So you ran off with an exotic French woman you barely knew in order to become a criminal and you told your family you’d become a chef?” 

“Now you know why I can’t have accountant as a cover story. At least, not a cover story attached to my real name. I never graduated from college.” 

“I could forge you a diploma,” Eames offered. 

Arthur’s dimples flashed. “Thanks, but then I’d get hell for not inviting them to the graduation. ‘Chef’ was easier.”

“You’re a good enough cook to get them to believe that?” asked Eames, intrigued. He’d never had fantasies about Arthur cooking for him, but now he was. A _lot_. 

“I’ve always been a decent cook, and I have parents who are willing to always believe the best of me, unfortunately for them. It was a good cover story to excuse away my lack of interest in finishing college, in a way few other careers I could pretend at would be. I said I was a private chef working for wealthy patrons, so they didn’t get suspicious while I traveled the world. And I send them postcards and souvenirs and hope that I don’t get killed and leave my family with never another word from me, with them never knowing what happened to me, totally convinced I’m just a golden child making his name in the world. So yeah, basically I’m the world’s worst son.” Arthur said it lightly, but he was staring up at the ceiling and he looked displeased. 

Eames said, “You’re not just good at being a point man. You’re the best. You are literally the acknowledged _best_ at what you do, even by your enemies. You’re not the world’s worst anything. You’re just who you are. And you’re definitely not the world’s worst son. I’ve met bad sons. You’re not even close.” 

Arthur shook his head a little. “I didn’t mean to turn this into… _this_.” 

Eames ignored him and said, “You promised Mal you’d take care of Dom.” The realization came so suddenly that Eames almost felt like he’d always known it. Of course, now Arthur’s behavior made perfect sense. 

Arthur nodded. “Ages ago. By then Mal had had the kids, and she was taking fewer jobs, and Dom and I had realized that we worked well together.” 

“Or Dom realized Mal had dropped a gem in his lap and decided to tie you close to him,” said Eames, possibly a little bitterly, but his views on Dom were…complicated. 

“It wasn’t like that. It wasn’t anything planned. It just happened. We were a good team, no more, no less.” 

Eames privately had another opinion on that, but he kept his face expressionless and Arthur, as he’d hoped, went on. 

“So Mal told me to look out for him. I’m sure she asked the same thing of Dom when it came to me.” 

And Eames had an opinion on that, too, but bit his tongue. Instead he said, “You believed Dom’s story?” 

Arthur turned his head and looked at Eames evenly. His eyes were unreadable and his face was expressionless as he said, “Did you think he killed her, when you heard?” 

And Eames had the impression that this question was a test he had to carefully pass, but he had no idea what to say to achieve that. So he told the truth. “I didn’t know what the hell to think. The rumors coming out in those days about the Cobbs were all over the place. But you stuck by him, and I knew you wouldn’t have if he’d killed her, so I followed your lead on that.” 

“I could have been in on it,” Arthur suggested, still flat and inscrutable. 

“Arthur,” said Eames, and wrapped his name in fondness, swamped it with affection, because he couldn’t help it. “You don’t kill people like that, love. I know you pretend to, but you don’t. She’d never crossed you. In fact, from everything I’d ever heard, she adored you and trusted you and you never betray that, ever.” 

Arthur blinked, his eyes dark, and still Eames had no clue what was going on in that head. 

Eames added, “Plus, you wouldn’t have left that crime scene a mess; you would have cleaned it up.” 

Arthur smiled, just a little bit, too sad for dimples, but at least it was a reaction. Eames decided he didn’t want Arthur expressionless, ever. It was how Arthur was professionally, even-keeled and reactionless, and now that Eames had ruffled him as much as he had, he was addicted to the rush of it, to the _Arthurness_ of the Arthur that had emerged from all of it, this Arthur sharing confessions naked in bed with him. 

Arthur said, not really looking at Eames as he said it, “Mal had been…deteriorating…for a while. We were trying to get to her, all of us. She just…thought we were making everything up. She thought she’d dreamed me. You’d think that’d be incredibly flattering. ‘Oh, Arthur, you’re just my ideal gay best friend.’ As if I were that perfect. Because in the end the perfect fucking gay best friend couldn’t stop any of it, and it was so disconcerting, so _fucking_ awful, to just be told you’re a dream, to be dismissed as…I fucking hate the idea of dreams come true, Eames, they’re terrifying.” 

Eames didn’t say anything because he didn’t know what to say to that. 

Arthur said, on a sigh, “So no, I never thought, even for a second, that Dom had killed Mal. Because I knew the headspace Mal had been in. And all I could remember was that I’d promised her—when she knew I was a real person and not a dream—that I would take care of Dom for her. And I liked Dom, anyway. It wasn’t like it was all obligation. We were friends, and he went to pieces, and I know you don’t like him but he would have done the same for me. And I know he went crazy on that inception job, but, I don’t know, he was trying to get his kids back and they’re great kids, so, I don’t know.” 

Eames looked at Arthur and felt the weight of the million secrets Arthur had just shared with him. Arthur wasn’t looking at him. Arthur was looking everywhere but at him. He looked uncharacteristically uncertain, like he didn’t know how any of what he’d just said was going to be received. 

And Eames heard himself say, “I have no idea who my father is.” 

Arthur looked at him then, surprise evident on his face. 

Eames continued in an unthinking rush. “I know dreamsharing thinks it’s this big secret I’m keeping to myself, but the truth is I have no idea who he is. I never met him. I’m not even sure my mother knew who he was.” 

Arthur said, “You don’t have to—”

But it seemed suddenly the absolute right thing to do. Arthur had gone for broke with him just now, and there was no way Eames wasn’t going to respond to that. And, anyway, Eames _wanted_ to. All of the myths and legends of a forger’s life, and Eames just wanted one person to know all of it. “I have no idea why she even bothered to have me, I really don’t. And I have no idea how I survived my infancy.” 

“You were cunning,” said Arthur, after a moment. “I bet you were a cunning infant. I bet you came out of the womb with some kind of con already in place. You probably pickpocketed the nurse who delivered you.” 

Eames chuckled, because he appreciated Arthur’s effort. “She died when I was eight, and then I took to the streets, and I know this all sounds like something out of bloody _Oliver Twist_.” 

“I hate Dickens,” Arthur said with feeling. 

“That’s the sexiest thing you’ve ever said to me, pet,” Eames informed him. 

Arthur smiled at him, then said, “You don’t have to tell me all this.” 

“Because you already know?” Because Eames suspected Arthur did. 

Arthur shook his head. “Because it doesn’t matter.” 

“Why did you tell me about Mal and the coffee shop in Iowa City?” 

“Because no one knows about that anymore, and I wanted someone to.” 

It was so similar to what Eames had been thinking, with telling Arthur his background, that for a second Eames couldn’t think of what to say next. And then he said, “When I was a kid, one of my marks was into modern furniture, and I thought his flat was amazing: I’d never seen anything like it. The way you dreamed about Paris? I dreamed of a flat like that. Of _making it_ like that. Of being grown up and rich and not worrying about anything. It was…the pinnacle. And he had this chair, I was basically in love with this chair, the way you fall in love with the first brush of luxury as a child. And I remember him saying to me—looking at me and saying to me, ‘That’s an Eames lounge. Don’t fucking go near it because it’s worth more than your life.’ A _chair_. It was a bloody fucking chair and he said it was worth more than my entire life. An Eames lounge.” 

There was a moment of silence. Eames wondered wildly why he’d told that story. He’d chosen his name so long ago, and he’d never told anyone why he’d chosen it, had allowed all the swirl of speculation about it, because he didn’t want to say that he’d chosen it because an unfeeling mark had hurt his adolescent feelings. 

“What happened to the mark?” asked Arthur. 

“I cleaned out his savings.” 

“Good,” said Arthur.

“And then I went and learned everything I could about art and found the love of my life, so it all worked out.” 

“The love of your life?” Arthur asked it with satisfying swiftness. 

“Art,” Eames told him, carefully not smiling. 

“Ah,” said Arthur. “Yes. I could see that. And that’s how you got into art forgery?”

“I was always good at mimicry, which was useful for pulling a con, and I also liked drawing, so it wasn’t much of a leap. I turned out to be good at it, plus I really loved art, so that encouraged some very brilliant old masters of the whole thing to give me lessons.” Eames tried to be casual about it, tried not to make it sound like a big deal, even though the discovery of his love of art had been the beginning of his leap from petty crime to the point where he ended up seeing the world with a ton of money hidden in various bank accounts. “And from them I developed a reputation, and so for a little while I was just a forger of great art, and then it was only after that that someone asked me if I’d ever tried dream forgery, and then that was how that whole thing happened.” Eames paused. “And then, many years later, I bought myself my own Eames lounge.” 

“Good for you.” Arthur sounded pleased, and also like he somehow understood that Eames had made it sound like it had been nothing when it had been an entire lifetime’s worth of difference that had led to him meeting Arthur in the first place. After a silent moment, Arthur said, “How old were you, with that mark with the Eames lounge?”

“Christ, I don’t even know.” Eames tried to recall. “Twelve? Thirteen?” 

“So he told a thirteen-year-old kid that his chair was worth more? Do you remember his name?” 

Eames grinned at him around the odd, ridiculous tightness in his chest that was probably the start of a heart attack. “Arthur, darling, you’ve got that look in your eye.” 

“What look?”

“That ‘I must right a wrong in the universe, go and fetch me a gun’ look.” 

“Well,” said Arthur, and tried to shrug. 

“I love that look,” said Eames, still grinning, and rolled on top of him because he couldn’t maintain the distance anymore, he wanted to press Arthur to every part of him. If he could have opened his chest and tucked Arthur inside, he would have, just to ease the ache there. “You’re ridiculously hot when you’re feeling vengeful.” 

“Is that why you try to provoke me so much?” 

Eames couldn’t help the delight that flooded him, because he just _loved_ it when Arthur bantered like this, loved it when he teased and Arthur teased back. He had always loved it but he loved it more when Arthur did it in bed, with a hand wandering down Eames’s bare back, with a softness around his eyes that Eames never usually saw there. He just bloody loved _Arthur_ , he knew, and he wasn’t going to stop, he wasn’t going to hit bottom, he was just going to keep falling, for the rest of his life. He pressed his face against Arthur’s neck so Arthur wouldn’t see his expression and said, “I love to vex you,” and if it came out a bit rougher than was necessary, then Eames tried to cover it with a swipe of his tongue along Arthur’s skin. 

“I’ve noticed.” 

“You’re so delicious when you’re vexed,” Eames informed him, and bit down on his collarbone. “I secretly love it when things go all pear-shaped and you get vexed and have to wave your gun around.” Eames lifted his head and looked down at him. “Not a euphemism,” he clarified. 

Arthur flipped them, and Eames let him because it was hardly a hardship to let Arthur stretch out solidly on top of him. And Arthur said sheepishly, “I own an Eames lounge, too.” 

Eames blinked up at him in astonishment. “Don’t tease me,” he managed. 

“I’m not.” Arthur was blushing, that delightful blush Eames was never going to get enough of. “I don’t own it because of _you_. I own it because I like it.” 

“Oh my God, you bought my chair,” said Eames gleefully. 

“No, I didn’t. Not like that.”

“Tell me, what naughty things do you get up to in your _Eames lounge_?” 

“I don’t know how you ever get anybody to sleep with you; you have the worst fucking lines.” 

“I have good fucking other things,” said Eames. 

“My verdict’s still out,” said Arthur primly. 

“Let me make another argument,” Eames said. “I don’t think you’ve seen my best closing yet.” 

Arthur groaned, but he did it directly into Eames’s shoulder, so Eames was totally okay with that groan. “You have never met a metaphor you didn’t want to beat to death, have you?” 

“Gentleman of the jury,” said Eames, enjoying himself. “Order in the court.” 

“Just because you say them lasciviously doesn’t make them clever double entendres, you know.” 

“‘Lasciviously,’” repeated Eames. “Say that again.” 

“Shut up,” said Arthur, lifting his head up. 

“Is this where I say ‘make me’?”

“This is where you _shut up_ ,” said Arthur, “Christ,” and kissed him hard, and Eames messed up Arthur’s hair even more than it already was and adjusted his hold on him, enjoying the sensation of arousal clicking its way into place, the thickening of blood and the springing of sweat and the harshness of breath. 

Arthur said breathlessly, as he closed his teeth into Eames’s neck and Eames hissed out a swear, “It suits you.” 

“What?” gasped Eames, no longer following the thread of conversation. 

“Your name.” Arthur panted it into Eames’s mouth. “Eames. It suits you. It was a good choice.” 

And Eames heard himself say, utterly compliant, he would have said anything at that moment, this was the danger of Arthur, this had always been the danger of Arthur, “My actual name is—”

And Arthur swallowed his name into a kiss, and when he pulled back he murmured, “That I already know.” 

“Show-off,” said Eames.

“All rise,” said Arthur, and then, “That’s another court double entendre, get it?”

Bloody Christ, thought Eames, staring up in astonishment at the sight of Arthur, disheveled and grinning and making _terrible jokes_ at him. Arthur was going to be the absolute _death_ of him. “Shut the bloody hell up,” growled Eames, because he couldn’t _stand it_. 

“Kettle,” said Arthur, and smiled into the kiss. 

***

Arthur woke up from a doze to Eames sprawled half on top of him, face mashed into Arthur’s shoulder. It should have been incredibly uncomfortable—and it actually _was_ —but Arthur was love-addled enough to just find it charming. Eames could have woken up and said, _Arthur, love, while you were sleeping I cleaned out every hidden bank account you have and turned you in to the police_ , and Arthur would have found it charming. Arthur found himself frankly sickening. 

He brushed Eames’s tumbled hair out of his face anyway. 

He really wanted to pause and rain kisses onto every bit of Eames’s skin he could reach. Not with intent—Arthur felt a bit like he couldn’t handle another orgasm at the moment—but chastely, possessively, just so he could say that he’d kissed every bit of Eames’s skin, just so he could cherish it as a personal achievement. But if he did that, Eames would wake up and ask him what he was doing, and it was fine to think that Arthur was up for a bit of fun and even okay to think that Arthur was in the habit of sharing post-coital confessions, but Arthur couldn’t abide the idea of Eames realizing how hopelessly, stupidly, ridiculously in love Arthur was with him. He could envision Eames’s expression shifting into pity and it made him shudder with horror. 

So he lay there for a bit and let Eames half-suffocate him and let himself be sickeningly smitten with the entire situation. 

And then, eventually, he sighed and tried to wriggle his way out. 

Eames made a protesting noise that sounded like it could have come from a six-year-old and immediately pulled Arthur back in. “Where are you going?” he mumbled into Arthur’s skin, using a sloppy, sleepy, half-hearted kiss to his shoulder as punctuation. 

“I’m taking a shower,” Arthur informed him. “I’m totally disgusting.” 

“No, you’re not,” Eames denied. 

“Yes, I am.” 

“Okay, fine,” Eames allowed. “But if you clean yourself up, then I’ll have to clean myself up, too.” 

“That’s the general idea,” Arthur agreed dryly. 

There was a very long moment of silence, and then Eames said, “You can have the first shower,” and moved entirely off of Arthur and then even shifted position on the bed to sprawl with his back facing him. 

For a second, Arthur looked at the broad (and tattooed) expanse of Eames’s back and hesitated. Was Eames _mad_? But about what? It made no sense. 

Arthur gave up ever trying to understand Eames and got out of bed and studied his clothing options. He chose the suit with care, partly because he always chose his clothing with care and partly because he wanted to find something Eames would like, because Arthur had _lost_ his _mind_. 

He stood in the shower and washed Eames off of him and had a moment of sudden, blinding panic where he actually breathed aloud, “What are you _doing_?” 

Because he’d woken up in bed with Eames. He’d had _Eames_. And Eames was going to walk away soon enough and why the fuck was Arthur helping him do it? Why wasn’t Arthur doing everything in his power to keep him there as long as he could manage, before he had to lose it all again? 

Arthur donned the three-piece suit, tied his tie in a careful, perfect knot, slicked back his hair, and regarded the outcome in the mirror. He looked exactly the way he always looked. You would never know he’d just finally gotten the love of his life into bed. 

The bedroom was empty when Arthur got out of the bathroom, so he walked into the living area, where Eames was sprawled on one of the couches, watching television. He’d pulled on clothing sloppily: sweatpants and a ratty T-shirt that Arthur would have thrown out rather than ever consider wearable. And he’d combed his hair a bit; it was in less disarray. 

He said, “My turn?” without looking at Arthur. 

Arthur retrieved his notebook and turned back to Eames, who had now stood and was heading toward the bedroom. “Eames,” Arthur said. 

Eames glanced over his shoulder, registered the notebook. “I understand that we just wasted a bunch of time, but can you at least wait until after I shower before we jump back in?” 

Arthur shook his head and walked over to Eames. “I want you to draw.” 

Eames took the notebook Arthur handed out in an automatic gesture, looking honestly quizzical. “Draw what?” 

“Me.”

Eames was plainly startled. “You?” 

“You’re good at it. I’ve seen your sketch of Mycroft. It was an uncanny likeness.” 

“Yes,” Eames agreed, sounding confused. “That’s what I do. I do likenesses. But I don’t—”

“I want you to draw me.” Arthur wasn’t entirely sure where this driving desire of his was coming from, just that he badly wanted to see what he looked like through Eames’s eyes. “I want you to draw me, and then I want you to unwrap me like a present, and then I want you to fuck me until I forget who I am, until all I can remember is you.” 

Eames’s eyes went dark, pupils blowing wide, and Arthur marveled over the fact that he now knew exactly what Eames looked like in the millisecond before he pounced on you. “That can be arranged,” said Eames, clearly trying for casual and getting nowhere near it, his voice low and husky and Arthur could have shivered from Eames’s voice alone, it was the equivalent of a caress to him. 

Eames went to reach for him and Arthur drew on reserves of strength—who would have ever predicted that he would be able to stop Eames from reaching for him?—and lifted his hand and blocked him and said, “Draw me first.”


	25. Chapter 25

Chapter 25

Eames had never done this before ever in his life. And the number of things that could be said about was increasingly small. 

He drew, yes. He had always drawn. He couldn’t remember a time he hadn’t been scrounging for something to draw with, for something to draw on. All of his earliest memories revolved around the activity. He could recall his mother only dimly, but he could vividly remember a bright red drawing he’d made of her when he’d been a toddler. His mother had not been sentimental and had not kept his childhood scribblings for any length of time, but he still remembered that drawing as being his mother, when he thought about her. 

But Eames had never drawn a serious portrait for a model who was sitting for him, and he had no idea where to start. 

“Where do you want me?” Arthur asked, and Eames opened his mouth to give any number of filthy suggestions, but Arthur headed him off at the pass because Arthur knew him _so well_ that Eames could cry with it, knew him better than Eames had ever let anyone know him. Arthur gave him that adorable look of Arthurian exasperation and said, “For the _drawing_ , Eames.” 

Eames scratched at the back of his neck—which was something he only ever did during the very rare times when he was actually nervous. He was _nervous_ now, over drawing _Arthur_ , and he wondered why he didn’t just press his advantage and say no and kiss Arthur past the disappointment. But, dammit, Arthur seemed to want this, Arthur looked hopeful about this, and Arthur had gone and put on a bloody three-piece suit just so Eames could peel him out of it because Eames had expressed a desire to do so, so the least Eames could do was draw a sodding sketch of him. 

“I don’t know,” Eames admitted, and then tried to cover his inexperience. “Where would you like to sit? I find that seating choice reveals much about the subject.” 

Arthur gave him a look that Eames didn’t know how to place—amused? fond?—and simply sat on one of the room’s armchairs. “How’s this?” 

“Okay,” said Eames. “Yes. Perfect.” He sat opposite Arthur and looked from Arthur to paper, Arthur to paper. It was a bloody _sketch_. He could do this. He’d sketched Mycroft unthinkingly only days earlier. 

Eames put his pencil to the paper tentatively, an attempt to draw the long, sinuous line of Arthur’s body, and frowned at it and turned to the next fresh page in Arthur’s notebook. 

“Take off your shirt,” Arthur said. 

Eames glanced up at him, cocking an eyebrow. “Are we doing some kind of role-playing thing right now?” 

Arthur rolled his eyes. “I want to hear about your tattoos, and it’s easier if I can see them.” 

Eames shrugged and pulled off his T-shirt, then tried to start again on Arthur’s sketch. 

“Tell me about them,” Arthur said. 

“What about them?” 

“Everything about them. Start with the wave one on your right shoulder.” 

Eames smiled a little bit, sketching Arthur from memory without even glancing at him, without even noticing it. “You would pick that one. It’s a memento from Rio.” 

“Do you have a tattoo from every job?” Arthur asked, sounding surprised. 

Only the ones that he wanted to remember, and he had met Arthur on that job, so it had definitely merited a tattoo. Eames didn’t say that. He just said, “No. Only some of them,” and kept sketching. 

“So do you have one from the inception job?” 

“The snowflakes,” Eames said, pausing long enough to indicate the swirl of snowflakes down the left side of his chest, dancing over other tattoos. 

“Snowflakes?” echoed Arthur. 

Eames quirked a smile at his paper. “Because my level was a blizzard.” 

“You were in charge of the weather.” 

“I may have been heartily sick of heat at the time I was doing that dreamshare,” responded Eames.

“I’m sorry I missed you on the skis,” remarked Arthur. “I bet it was hot.”

“I’m sorry I missed you executing a kick in zero gravity. That was doubtless hotter.” Eames regarded his sketch, and realized he was, without consciously intending it, drawing Arthur in bed. Arthur with his expression open and unguarded, with his mouth soft and lush, with his eyes heavy and dark, with his hair tumbled and alluring. It was undoubtedly Arthur—and an Arthur he now amazingly knew—but it wasn’t what he wanted. Although at least Arthur’s distraction technique had helped him draw at all. 

He frowned at it and turned the page again. 

“So do you design your own tattoos?” Arthur asked. 

“Sometimes,” said Eames, deciding to actually glance at Arthur once in a while so he could draw the Arthur posing for him instead of the one that lived in his head. 

“How do you decide what you’re going to get?” 

“It comes to me in a dream,” said Eames. 

“Does it?” asked Arthur, sounding surprised. 

“No, of course not. I don’t know, I just decide. Is that why you don’t have any tattoos? Indecision?” 

There was a moment of silence. “Eames, I’m Jewish. We can’t have tattoos. My parents would have a fit.” 

Eames stopped drawing entirely and looked at Arthur for a moment, saw that he was one-hundred percent serious, and then collapsed backward into laughter, not even caring that Arthur looked vaguely offended. “ _Arthur_. You’re a _criminal_. For a _living_. And you’re worried about your parents being upset about a _tattoo_? Christ, the rules you decide to pay attention to are _extraordinary_ , petal.” 

“Just because I don’t break rules just for the sake of breaking them,” grumbled Arthur. 

And _there_ it was, Eames saw suddenly. Arthur breaking through. Arthur in all his glory. “There you are,” breathed Eames, as Arthur lost a bit of his stiff posedness. No wonder Eames had been struggling. The Arthur in front of him hadn’t looked very much like the Arthur Eames knew. Arthur in his three-piece suits with the lethalness of a wolf lurking underneath it all. Arthur who could kill you a dozen different ways without a weapon but would do it _politely_. 

Eames said, “Lean back a bit.” 

Arthur slouched into the chair, a posture Eames had never seen him assume, ever. 

Eames shook his head. “No, never mind,” and Arthur straightened. Eames regarded him, and then said slowly, “Put your ankle on your knee.” 

“Which one?” asked Arthur, back to being self-conscious and very unmoving, as if Eames was taking some kind of long-exposure photograph of him. 

“Your preference.” 

Arthur’s left ankle settled on his knee. 

Eames swallowed thickly, because there was something undeniably seductive about telling Arthur to move in exactly the way he wanted and having Arthur just _do_ it. “Wrist on your ankle,” he told Arthur. 

Arthur extended his arm carefully, as if a sudden movement might disturb the tableau Eames was creating. 

“Just like that,” Eames told him, “don’t move,” and sketched him quickly. Arthur was all long lines, all sharp expensive fabric, the shape of him was important to get right, the way that Arthur so carefully and consciously chose how to fill the air around him.

Eames drew him without looking, in the end, so it was pointless that he’d made him pose, other than for the inspiration it had given him. He spent some time with Arthur’s face, with his expression, making him soft and hard all at once, the way Arthur was, once you knew him. _Come closer_ , said Arthur’s expression, _but carefully_. 

Eames looked down at the sketch critically, wondering if it even came close to capturing anything about Arthur, and became aware of Arthur’s harsh breaths filling the room, short and quick. Arthur was practically panting. 

Eames stole a glance up at him, and the expression on his face wasn’t anything close to the expression Eames had just drawn for him. _Come closer_ , said Arthur’s expression, _now, immediately_.

Eames put the notebook aside, and Arthur licked his lips and did not move an inch from the pose he was in. Eames dropped to his knees and crawled the few paces over to Arthur, which should have been ridiculous, except that he kept his eyes on Arthur’s and Arthur did not at all look like he thought it was ridiculous. 

Eames reached Arthur and knelt in front of him, and moved his ankle off of his knee, planting his shoe firmly on the floor. This dislodged Arthur’s hand, which he dropped to the chair awkwardly, as if unsure where it ought to go. Eames held his gaze and spread Arthur’s legs so that he could better fit himself between them and pulled Arthur closer to the edge of the armchair. Arthur watched him with wide, dark eyes and wet, parted lips gasping shallow breaths. 

Eames dropped his attention to Arthur’s tie, unknotted it with slow, painstaking precision, pulled it achingly through Arthur’s collar, the expensive whir of the fabrics brushing against each other loud in the deafening silence they were enveloped in. He looked back at Arthur when he finally finished with the tie, and Arthur’s eyes were closed, the tip of his tongue lightly resting against his lip. 

Eames wanted to kiss him but resisted the urge. Instead he shrugged Arthur out of his jacket, smoothing his hands over Arthur’s shoulders and down Arthur’s chest, heaving under his touch. Eames slid each waistcoat button elegantly through its hole, watching his fingers’ progress carefully, and when it was done he stole another glance at Arthur. Arthur’s eyes were open now, watching him, heavy-lidded and hot. Arthur looked completely wrecked and Eames hadn’t even laid a finger on skin yet. 

Eames unbuttoned Arthur’s shirt with the same care he’d taken with Arthur’s waistcoat. The shirt’s fabric was so expensive that its stiff heaviness actually took Eames by surprise. He tugged it out of Arthur’s trousers as best he could with Arthur’s braces in the way—how many fucking layers did he have to wear, _really_?—and finished unbuttoning the shirt, forcing himself to do it slowly. 

And then, finally, he parted the fabric and found himself having reached skin. He thanked God that Arthur wasn’t wearing a vest, too, and laid his hands on Arthur’s stomach. Arthur’s entire body shuddered at the contact, his breathing kicking up another notch, and Eames used his hands to frame an open expanse of skin for him to lean forward and mouth against. Arthur made a sound so incredibly delicious that Eames thought he was destined to masturbate to the memory of that sound for the rest of his life. 

His hands were already at Arthur’s fly, and Arthur was already achingly hard, and Eames glanced up at him to find him watching, so he held his gaze when he went down on him. Arthur gave a gasp, and his hands twitched where he’d balled them into fists on the chair, and Eames wanted to push him over the edge, wanted to disintegrate all of that Arthurian control. 

Arthur arched into him, helpless, his head lolling back against the armchair, but Eames pushed his hips back down and pinned him. Arthur made a sound, desperate and almost whining, but Eames ignored him, ignored the thudding beat of his own pulse telling him to go faster, and instead forced himself to keep his breathing steady, to keep his pace slow, slow, _so slow_ , because he remembered how he’d felt when he’d thought Arthur was getting dressed in order to halt all of this, and he had no idea how much longer he was going to have with him, and he wanted to make all of this _last_ , damn it. 

Arthur squirmed in his grasp. Eames was mostly touching the fabric that Arthur was still wearing but when he brushed against skin, it was slick with sweat. 

“Eames,” Arthur gasped, his voice little more than a rasp, and Eames felt the thrill of hearing his name said by Arthur like that ripple over him. “Fucking…” Arthur sucked in air, tried again, and Eames’s hands held against the press of Arthur’s hips, anticipating the motion. “Christ,” Arthur swore. 

Eames freed up his hands long enough to grab Arthur’s and place them on his head because Arthur was apparently pretending to be too polite to pull at Eames’s hair. Then he went back to pinning Arthur, to driving him pleasantly mad. 

Arthur’s hands twisted painfully into Eames’s hair, immediately accepting Eames’s encouragement to do so, and his words were sobs now. “Eames—I—God—I—Jesus— _oh_ —fuck—keep—keep—you’re—I—oh—Eames—Eameseameseameseameseames _eames_ ,” said Arthur, in one long rush of breathless sound, and Arthur’s hands were tight in Eames’s hair as if he was the only thing Arthur ever wanted to touch for the rest of his life, and Eames swallowed him down with his name ringing in his ears, dizzy intoxication. 

Afterward Arthur collapsed bonelessly backward and his grip on Eames’s hair eased up, although he left his hands loosely resting there. 

Eames nosed his way up Arthur’s body, licking and kissing and nibbling and biting as he went. 

“Eames,” said Arthur, on a sex-drunk happy sigh, and carded his hands through Eames’s hair. 

“Arthur,” Eames mumbled in reply into Arthur’s breastbone. 

“Eames,” said Arthur again, still petting at him, his voice still so blurry and soft around the edges that Eames wanted to burrow into it like a blanket. 

“Arthur,” said Eames, kissing underneath Arthur’s freshly shaven jaw. 

“Eames,” said Arthur, and now his fingers splayed across Eames’s head, nudged Eames in for a kiss. 

“Darling,” Eames said, and Arthur smiled, sloppy and sated and a little bit dazzled and a little more dazzling with his dimples all full-power like that, and kissed him. 

“Eames,” said Arthur, hands now cupping Eames’s jaw, holding him in place, licking into the kisses. 

_Love_ , Eames thought but didn’t say. 

But it didn’t matter: Arthur kissed him like he’d said it, anyways. 

***

“This is unprecedented,” remarked Mycroft, standing just outside the sitting room doorway. 

Sherlock glared at him. “Well, aren’t you going to barge in and make yourself at home the way you usually do?” 

“You _summoned_ me.” Mycroft looked endlessly amused. Mycroft was _smirking_. 

“You’ve actually gained weight since the last time I saw you,” said Sherlock sourly. 

Mycroft’s smirk didn’t waver as he finally entered the room. “What’s this all about, brother dear?” 

“You’re gaining weight at an alarming rate these days,” continued Sherlock. 

“Hello, John,” said Mycroft pleasantly. 

John said, “One of your criminals stole my mobile.” 

That got rid of the smirk, so Sherlock was grateful John had mentioned it. 

“Honestly,” said Mycroft, clearly gearing up for a lecture, “this isn’t a _game_ with Moriarty and I wish you’d stop treating it that way.” Mycroft was frowning at Sherlock because Mycroft was always frowning at Sherlock. 

“I’m not treating it like a game,” Sherlock snapped. 

“You let Eames steal John’s mobile,” Mycroft pointed out. 

Sherlock ignored that. “Stop blackmailing them and let them go,” he said. 

Mycroft lifted his eyebrows. “Don’t tell me you’ve gone and developed yet another crush on yet another criminal.” 

John made a sound that was almost a snort but could also have been characterized as a squeak. Sherlock glared at Mycroft, glanced at John, who was studiously examining the wallpaper, and then looked back at Mycroft. 

“It’s not going to end well,” Sherlock insisted. 

“Fascinating to me, that _you_ of all people are warning me something with Moriarty isn’t going to end well.” 

“He’s serious, Mycroft,” John inserted. “This thing Moriarty’s doing, they can’t really get around it safely. They actually showed up here and threw all of that drug down the sink, that’s how serious they are about the danger.” 

Mycroft looked at Sherlock. “So they eliminated the danger to you? First intelligent thing they’ve done.” 

“You’re not going to get anything out of Moriarty’s head,” Sherlock shouted at him, frustrated. “You were never going to get anything out of Moriarty’s head.” 

“You’re the one who lost to Moriarty,” said Mycroft evenly. “Not me. I will break him eventually. I will learn what he knows.” 

“And you don’t care how many people get hurt in the process?” John demanded, sounding furious, because John got furious over things like that. 

Mycroft said, his eyes steadily on Sherlock as if John hadn’t spoken, “I focus on the number of people his knowledge will _save_. What’s this all about, Sherlock? Don’t tell me you’re worried about them; you never waste energy worrying about other people.” 

“I don’t care what happens to them, I just don’t like to share Moriarty,” Sherlock bit out, striving for loftiness. 

Mycroft’s eyes were narrow and deductive and Sherlock hated him. He watched them flicker meaningfully toward John, making sure Sherlock noticed, and then back to Sherlock. “Don’t think of them as some sort of symbolic representation of your situation. They’re not.” And then Mycroft, damn him, turned and insufferably walked away. 

Sherlock waited until he heard the door close before hurling a book against the wall. 

“What the hell was he on about at the end there?” John asked. 

“Doesn’t matter,” Sherlock seethed, and steepled his fingers and tapped them against his lips. 

“So what do we do now?” said John, after a second. 

“We make sure this Moriarty dreamshare never takes place.”

“Why, all of a sudden, are you so worried about this? It’s not because Eames and Arthur cut you out of the whole thing, is it? Because if this is all about your wounded ego—”

“This is all about the fact that it isn’t going to work and it’s a waste of everyone’s time and, apparently, sanity,” Sherlock retorted. “And you should understand that, you hate to waste people, you’re always so worried about _people_.” 

John looked at Sherlock. He looked so quizzical, so curious, so confused. He said, “Why would they be a symbolic representation of you?”

Sherlock decided to pretend to be too deep in thought to respond to that inquiry. 

***

Arthur was curled toward him, sleeping deeply, hair tumbled over his forehead and pristine white shirt crumpled beyond all recognition. 

Eames was not sleeping at all. He was lying wide awake, staring up at the ceiling, refusing to let himself behave like a love-struck teenager and watch Arthur sleep. He was thinking of Arthur kissing his way over Eames’s tattoos, lazy licks of lips and tongue, demanding incoherent stories from him about them, keeping his shirt on by Eames’s request, because there was something unspeakably filthy to him about being sprawled in a bed underneath Arthur in an unbuttoned white dress shirt. Eames was never going to be able to look at button-down white dress shirts ever again. 

Eames was never going to be able to…

Arthur clearly thought the entire Moriarty job was a bad bet, not one he would have taken under any other circumstances. Arthur would have walked away, and Arthur wasn’t walking away because of _Eames_. 

Eames dug the heels of his hands into his eyes and listened to Arthur’s heavy, even breathing, deep enough that Eames could feel the brush of his exhalations, and swore silently in myriad different languages. He wanted this to be his life, desperately, and instead he had Arthur in all of his debauched perfection sleeping trustingly next to him only because they were about to do a job that would probably leave them both insane. Because of _Eames_. 

Eames looked over at Arthur, at the moue his lips formed in sleep. Arthur never let his lips get so lush and obscene in wakefulness, kept them pressed into thin lines from which no dimples could escape. Eames looked at the wonder of him the way he was, all of him, and Eames got out of bed. 

Arthur stirred but he didn’t try to kill Eames, and Eames thought that showed a display of trusting progress that he couldn’t deal with at all. 

“Eames?” Arthur said into his pillow, not even opening his eyes, and the fact of Arthur letting himself be sleepy enough to refuse to open his eyes made Eames feel like he was in danger of suffocating right there. 

“I get first shower this time,” Eames told him around the lump in his throat, keeping his voice low and soothing. “Go back to sleep, I’ll wake you when I’m done.” 

“Mmm,” said Arthur, and turned his head further into the pillow.

Eames crept around retrieving clothing and then glanced over at Arthur. He seemed to be sound asleep. 

Eames took the world’s quickest shower, efficiently scrubbing himself clean before dressing just as quickly. When he slid out of the bathroom, Arthur still seemed to be sound asleep, and Eames the con artist with ingrained survival instincts thought it was time to make his speedy and silent getaway. 

Eames the lovesick idiot who had spent too many years of his life pining for the man nearly naked in the bed in the room next door stopped and wrote a note first. 

***

Arthur woke to silence. And instead of realizing immediately how suspicious that was, he wasted some time by turning his face into the pillow and breathing deeply. He wanted to snuggle back under the covers and let the world fall away, he thought, and because Arthur slept for a job, he didn’t normally feel that way about sleeping. 

Actually, he really wanted to snuggle back under the covers with Eames, and he was annoyed Eames wasn’t in bed anymore and was dreading getting up and going back to the real world where he did not snuggle under covers with Eames. Eames was used to this, used to fucking people and pretending nothing had happened the next day. The idea of just sitting across from Eames, facing him, and _working_ , as if nothing had _changed_ between them, made dread settle cold and hard in Arthur’s stomach. Arthur was no forger: he wasn’t sure he was a good enough actor to pull any of this off. 

Arthur eventually forced himself out of bed. The suite was still quiet, so he took advantage of the reprieve of having to awkwardly face Eames and showered. He dressed with the same care he’d shown toward the outfit he’d worn for Eames to draw. It wasn’t very far off his usual morning routine, and yet afterward he considered all of it to be a waste of valuable time. It wasn’t until he was perfectly put together that he finally stepped out into the suite’s living area. 

It was empty. He’d expected to find Eames watching one of his Korean dramas on the television, but instead Eames was nowhere to be seen. 

“Eames?” Arthur called, but he’d already been distracted by the sight of his notebook on the coffee table. Arthur glanced around, didn’t see Eames anywhere. And, again, instead of being suspicious about that, he gave in to his curiosity and tugged the notebook over to him, flipping toward the back. 

The first sketch he came upon was clearly Arthur, but Arthur like he had never seen himself before, lazy and sated, throwing bedroom eyes up from the paper. Arthur stared at it—because surely he didn’t actually _look_ that way—then swallowed thickly before turning the page. 

The next sketch was the one he’d been expecting, him posed carefully in the chair, except that Eames’s drawing managed to make it look like a completely natural choice on his part, not artificial at all, as if someone had just happened upon him that way. His eyes were dark and sharp, daring, inviting and closed-off all at the same time, dry and sardonic but with a spark of good humor, serious as death and yet warm with promise. Arthur stared down at his own image without comprehension. Was that really how Eames saw him? Like _that_? Because Arthur wasn’t sure he’d expected the complexity of the drawing, and he wasn’t sure what to make of it now that he had it in front of him. 

So Arthur turned the page, because that was easier than dealing with the drawing, and that was when the bottom dropped out of his day. 

_Arthur_ —was how it began. And then it went on. _Arthur—When you have recovered from all the fantastic sex that’s tangled up your brain, you’ll realize I’ve done the only logical thing. –E. P.S. I am sorry, love. Forgive me—eventually—_.

Arthur stared at the note. He stared harder at the note. Then he threw the notebook down and shouted, “Eames!” 

No answer. 

Just as he’d known there wouldn’t be. 

Arthur glanced around the suite and realized that Eames had taken the PASIV with him. “Son of a _bitch_ ,” said Arthur passionately.


	26. Chapter 26

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> lunaisfree is running a giveaway over on Tumblr! You should check it out! http://earlgreytea68.tumblr.com/post/112750981701/lunaisfree-give-away-reblog-and-or

Chapter 26

Normally Eames planned his cons fairly carefully. He knew he had a reputation for fly-by-night-ness, but he played that up in order to be underestimated. He was actually a compulsive planner, a secret he kept jealously guarded. Eames hadn’t survived as long as he’d survived by being sloppy about it. 

But he didn’t have a plan when he left the suite. His plan consisted entirely of _Keep Arthur safe_. That was generally a side objective of all of Eames’s plans, but he knew now what Arthur sounded like when he was pushed to the edge and over it, when he let himself get dismantled and then reassembled, and _Keep Arthur safe_ had leapfrogged over every other thought Eames had ever had in his head. He needed to keep Arthur safe, no matter what that meant. He needed to know that Arthur was somewhere in the world, Arthur, his Arthur, who might never know how much he was his but was, no matter the state of his hair, no matter his state of undress or not. 

Eames headed down to the lobby, with this primary objective of _Keep Arthur safe_. How to do that? Eames thought the best way was to make a deal with Mycroft. He should have made a deal with Mycroft from the very beginning, from the instant Mycroft had dragged Arthur into the whole thing. 

So Eames grabbed one of the absolutely blatant people hanging about the lobby clearly spying on him and shoved him up against the wall without warning, which provoked a flurry of panicked inactivity from everyone around him, including the other idiot so-called spies. 

Eames smiled at him and eased up on the pressure and smoothed the man’s coat back into place, fixing his rumpled lapels. “Just trying to get your attention, mate,” he said easily. “Now take me to your leader, would you?” 

The line actually worked. 

They took him to Mycroft at some sodding gentlemen’s club, and Eames had always hated gentlemen’s clubs. In his younger days, he’d used them to scope marks, and he’d never been able to get over his visceral reaction toward them, the tension of needing your next meal and needing it to come from one of these people. Gentlemen’s clubs, in Eames’s experience, were never populated by gentlemen, and Eames had never felt guilty about running cons through all of them. It was just that, when he’d been younger and still living hand-to-mouth; he hadn’t had _fun_ running the cons. Sometimes Eames cashed out a ridiculous amount of money and spread it out over a floor and walked through it, or onto a bed and laid on it, just to remind himself that he was never going to have to live hand-to-mouth that way ever again. 

And gentlemen’s clubs always reminded him of those days, always made him itch to order very, very good champagne and smash it on the marble floor, just to show his ability to extravagantly waste. 

“One and not the other?” Mycroft asked him, with an elegant curl of an eyebrow. He was drinking a scotch, but he didn’t offer one to Eames. “Aren’t you a package deal?”

“Only because you forced us to be,” Eames answered, with a tight smile. 

“Oh, come now,” scoffed Mycroft, “you were well on your way to that yourselves. Or you ought to have been. Half of my job description these days seems to be handling obstinate, oblivious men.” Mycroft muttered it into his drink, which he knocked back. 

Eames ignored that because it seemed secondary to the primary objective of _Keep Arthur safe_ , and laid the PASIV he’d brought with him on the nearest table. “I want to make a deal.” 

Mycroft’s annoying eyebrow was still annoyingly cocked. “Haven’t we already made a deal?” 

“I want to renegotiate.” 

“Really? And what makes you think you’re in any position to renegotiate?” 

Eames’s smile was tight and harsh and defiantly unamused. “Because you don’t want to do this, this whole thing with Moriarty. You think you need to, you think you have to. Queen and country and all that. You’re not terribly patriotic—not as patriotic as your job might imply—but you do feel a sense of obligation to the world at large. It’s a _noblesse oblige_ kind of thing. You’ve been blessed with genius, so you should use it to protect this civilization you’re so proud of. That’s why you’re keeping Moriarty alive and calling in dreamsharers and all this. You’re trying to be _thorough_ , so that no one can accuse you of bias. Because what you really _want_ to do is kill the bastard and get him as far away from your brother as you can manage.” 

Mycroft watched him, face betraying nothing, and that was how Eames knew he was exactly on the mark. Not that Eames was usually ever wrong when it came to people. 

“That’s where I come in,” continued Eames, and he had been confident before but he was growing comfortably into cockiness. “I’m going to take care of your Moriarty problem. I’m going to go in, right now, before he can cause any more trouble for you. I’ll get you all the information you need, and I’ll kill him on my way out the door. Free of charge.” 

“If I thought you could do all that on your own, I wouldn’t have forced you to call Arthur,” Mycroft pointed out. 

“Ah, but that got out of hand on you, didn’t it?” Eames said knowingly. “Arthur showed up and started running the show. Don’t worry. It happens to the best of us. He went and got your brother involved, which was exactly what you were hoping to avoid. And now your brother’s got a taste for the challenging mystery of how to crack Moriarty’s brain. But probably nothing to worry about. I’m sure your brother’s the reasonable type with good survival instincts, right?” 

Mycroft’s gaze was stony and displeased, and Eames felt triumphant. 

“So it’s time to come up with a new plan. Improvise a bit. I’m sure you recognize when it’s prudent to cut one’s losses. I go in alone, now, immediately. I get for you what I can get, and I kill Moriarty on the way out. You take those files you claim to have on Arthur, and you switch them back to me, and you let Arthur go, leave him alone. That’s the deal.” 

Mycroft blinked once, back to impassivity, giving nothing away. Eames thought he would have paid money to watch a poker game between Mycroft and Arthur. Then again, maybe the past few days had been that poker game. “And what if you don’t succeed?” said Mycroft. 

He wasn’t going to, Eames thought. He was going to give it his best shot—he didn’t have a death wish—but he wasn’t confident in it, and it didn’t matter, because he _was_ confident that Mycroft would keep his word about leaving Arthur alone, because Mycroft was the old-fashioned type. Eames had always lived his life on the knife-edge of almost-dying; he might as well make that death worth something. He might as well make that death worth _Arthur_ , which was the best thing Eames could ever have done with his death. “If I don’t succeed, sorry, but your game is up. You won’t get in with Arthur alone, because Arthur isn’t an idiot, as you’ve seen. Arthur will fuck everything up for you the way he’s already done. And you won’t have me to exploit anymore, so you’ll lose any leverage you ever had to make him behave. And the fact is: I might not succeed but you know that what I’m saying now is your best shot. You’d better take it.” Eames leveled Mycroft with a look and waited. 

Which was how he came to find himself, thirty minutes later, standing outside Moriarty’s cell, surveying him, thinking of how desperately he needed the element of some—any—surprise. 

In the end he walked in, and Moriarty turned and started to say something about somebody new, and Eames knocked him on the side of the head with the butt of his gun in one smooth movement, watching Moriarty topple satisfyingly over to the side. 

Eames got his PASIV ready, quickly, efficiently, moving from strong force of habit, refusing to let himself think too hard about anything else, focusing entirely on threading the needle into Moriarty’s vein, then into his own. Then he rested his fingers on the button and took a deep breath. He thought of the way Arthur smiled at him sometimes, all unreserved dimples, open and unwary. He thought of the sound of Arthur’s laughter, the feel of Arthur’s fingers scrabbling into his hair, across his skin, skimming along his tattoos. He thought of the plethora of ways Arthur said his name, exasperated, desperate, absent-minded, commanding, irritated, amused, puzzled, comfortable, something almost approaching fond. He thought of the way Arthur kissed, and the way Arthur slept, and the way Arthur held a gun, and the way Arthur dressed, and the way Arthur handled chaos, and the way Arthur built in a dream, and the way Arthur had flown into danger without a second thought because Eames had been involved. He thought of _Arthur_. 

Then he slept. 

***

Arthur tore out of the suite, cursing the slowness of the elevator, bouncing on his toes until he could get _out_. He raced through the lobby, ignoring the tails falling into place behind him, because he didn’t have fucking _time_. When Eames decided to be an idiot, Eames was first-class at it; he didn’t leave you any time, and Arthur had wasted so much time that morning already. 

Arthur didn’t break stride as he barreled out of the hotel and to the cab that had just let off some customers. The cab driver was on his cell phone, barking about something, and not really looking interested in moving, and Arthur jerked his door open and pulled him out bodily. The cab driver shouted in protest and struggled a little bit but Arthur had dealt with so much worse that he barely registered it, just tossed the cab driver aside and slid behind the wheel of the car. 

“Fucking London,” Arthur muttered, pulling his car over to the wrong side of the road and then punching it through the holes he could find in the traffic, keeping the mental map he’d made of the relevant bits of the city clear in his mind, so that he could screech his way to a halt on Baker Street. He could hear sirens in the distance, obviously pursuing him, but he ignored them, kicking in the door of 221B because he didn’t have time for the nicety of knocking. 

The landlady came out of her apartment, complaining about the door, and Arthur threw a handful of cash at her that he found in his pocket as he took the stairs two by two. 

“This is American money!” she yelled up at him, sounding even more offended than she had about the door. 

“So fucking change it!” Arthur shouted back. Like he had _time_ for these things. 

John and Sherlock were both standing in the doorway of the living room, but Arthur dashed past them, up the stairs to John’s bedroom. 

“Oi!” he heard John shout after him, but Arthur didn’t pause, there was _no time_. He heard John start up the stairs behind him, arriving at his own bedroom only a split second after Arthur pulled the gun out of the nightstand (so fucking predictable). 

John put his hands up warily, as if alarmed Arthur was about to shoot him. 

Arthur rolled his eyes. “Oh, for God’s sake, it’s not for you. But at least you keep it loaded, thank fuck.” Arthur kept it easily in his hand as he raced back down the stairs. He felt a hundred thousand times better already with the gun in his hand, and perhaps at a later date he should think about examining his addiction to weapons. 

Sherlock was watching him with close, narrow, aware eyes, and Arthur thought how Sherlock was one of the few people who knew, absolutely, how much Eames meant, what lengths Arthur would go to for _Eames_. So it didn’t surprise Arthur at all when Sherlock said, “What has Eames done?” 

“You’re coming with me,” Arthur told Sherlock. 

“Fine,” Sherlock replied, without hesitation. 

“Sherlock—” John began in protest. 

Sherlock ignored him. “What has Eames done?” he asked again. 

“Something stupid,” Arthur bit out. “Which is what Eames _does_ , stupid things, and I have to clean up the messes, and this stupid thing involves your brother, so you’re going to tell me where to find him and I’m going to hold a gun to his fucking head until he tells me where Moriarty is.” 

“Good plan,” agreed Sherlock, swirling his coat on. 

Arthur was relieved, because Arthur had had no idea how to get to Mycroft short of threatening one of Mycroft’s men, and that seemed like an idea that might get him entangled in bureaucratic nonsense at the expense of rescuing Eames. So Arthur, seeing Sherlock pulling on his coat, turned to head down the stairs, still clutching John’s gun like it was a security blanket. 

“ _Sherlock_ ,” said John, sounding exasperated, and Arthur half-turned back. 

“Look, come or don’t, I don’t really care, but if you try to waste time right now arguing about this, I swear to God, I will shoot you in the foot.” 

John’s face twisted in an expression Arthur recognized as _argument_ , and Arthur ignored his own threat and just kept walking down the stairs. 

He heard Sherlock say, “ _Eames_ is in _trouble_ ,” very meaningfully, as if that was some sort of code word for, _Arthur is acting like a crazy person but it’s justifiable and we should help him_. Which: maybe it was. 

For whatever reason, two people clattered down the stairs after him and made excuses to the clearly still annoyed landlady and then stood with Arthur looking at the gathered police. 

“There’s Lestrade,” John said, as one of the police came sauntering up, saying, “Guys, what’s going on here—” in a long-suffering tone. 

“I’m going to steal your police car,” Arthur announced. And then did. 

***

Moriarty’s head was a creepy, abandoned amusement park. 

Of _course_ it was. 

Eames stood next to a dilapidated roller coaster and took stock for a second. No immediate danger. He’d gotten in without being fallen upon immediately. So far, so good. 

First things first. Eames dreamed himself a mirror and forged himself into Sherlock Holmes, thinking that was his best bet of getting Moriarty to pause long enough to give him a chance here. Then he dreamed himself up a gas mask, remembering Arthur’s plan. Then he dreamed himself up a gorgeous gun. _Then_ he paused to get his bearings. 

The amusement park went on for a while all around him, as far as he could see. And it also looked deserted. The only movement was pieces of trash being blown about by a cold, howling wind that pierced through the place. Eames was grateful for Sherlock’s forged wool coat and neck-nestled scarf. 

Eames cocked his gun and moved forward cautiously. He saw no sign of Moriarty or any projections, but they had to be here somewhere. As were the secrets of Moriarty’s brain, all of that important public-safety information Mycroft was so keen to get his hands on. Get in, get it, get out was Eames’s motto in life, and he found his brain repeating it over and over, almost a mantra, as he moved edgily through the haunting terrain. 

He came upon a funhouse and he thought, _Oh. Of course_. Of course Moriarty would hide his deepest, darkest secrets in a funhouse. Eames should have predicted that upon finding himself in an amusement park in the first place. 

Eames felt the steadiness of his forge on top of him, the comforting heaviness of _being someone else_ , cradled his loaded gun in his arms, and stepped into the funhouse. 

“Step right up, step right up, to the greatest—Oh.” 

The voice cut itself off, sounding both surprised and pleased. Eames blinked, trying to adjust his vision to the dimness of the funhouse. Off to his right, pale light reflected off a gathering of mirrors, but directly in front of him and to his left was darkness. 

Until a light flared directly in front of him. A torch, being held directly underneath Moriarty’s chin, so that the grin he sent Eames was as gruesome as it could possibly be. 

“Look who it is!” Moriarty crooned at him in evident delight. “Finally, finally, finally!” Moriarty leapfrogged over to where Eames was still standing directly by the door, and Eames wondered what he was leaping to avoid; it was still too dark to see. “I didn’t think you’d come, you know. This whole wonderful amusement park, and I never thought you would come. I thought you were too _dull_ and _boring_.” Moriarty sneered the words disdainfully. 

Eames said nothing. Not that he could say much with the gas mask on anyways. But he thought silence was his best chance of fooling Moriarty. He wasn’t confident of his ability to mimic Sherlock’s speech patterns well enough, his quicksilver brain. So he just watched Moriarty with what he hoped was cool judgment, because that seemed Sherlockian to him. 

Moriarty didn’t seem suspicious at all. He went prattling on. “Is the gas mask really necessary though, Sherlock? A bit dramatic, don’t you think?” 

Eames just went on looking at him. 

“Well, it’s true, you’re right, I _do_ appreciate a flair for the dramatic. You can be rather lacking in that under ordinary circumstances. One might not think that, considering your coat, but your pedestrian taste in friends is _so_ troubling. Anyhow.” Moriarty clapped his hands together. “Do you want to see the rest of the park? Come on.” Moriarty leaned closer to him, conspiratorial, persuasive, almost flirtatious. “From one show-off to another, let me show off.” And Moriarty grinned again. 

Eames nodded carefully, instinctively clutching his gun a little closer to himself in readiness. Moriarty glanced at it, then turned and led the way out of the funhouse, and Eames followed, relieved to have dodged the bullet of the Hall of Mirrors. 

Moriarty kept up a running commentary as they wandered through the amusement park. Mainly this commentary consisted of descriptions of inventive crimes that he’d somehow memorialized in each ride. Eames wasn’t interested, as none of this seemed like information Mycroft would want. He wondered if he had to get them back in the funhouse, if Moriarty knew about forging and would keep all his most important stuff in the Hall of Mirrors. He pondered the dilemma while watching the projections who had begun to appear, working various ghostly and pointless jobs around the amusement park, glaring at him as he followed Moriarty past. 

“And here we come to a place very near and dear to both our hearts,” Moriarty said, and gestured. 

Great. Eames had only the barest knowledge of Sherlock’s history with Moriarty, and he suspected even that had been badly whitewashed by the tellers.

Eames edged forward, prepared for almost anything, to the door Moriarty had indicated, and when he peered in it was nothing but a swimming pool. 

***

They had _stolen_ a _police car_ , thought John, as he sat in the back seat and regarded the two lunatics in the front. Arthur had the siren blaring, clearing him a path, which was a good thing since John had already discerned that Arthur drove like a maniac. Sherlock looked like he was having the time of his life. Of course. Sherlock loved all insane things like this. 

Sherlock directed them to the Diogenes, and Arthur drove them there without ever taking his foot off the accelerator, and he parked very illegally, on the pavement, and clambered out of the car and into the club before anyone could warn him about the quiet rule. Not that John thought he would have paid attention. 

Arthur barked for Mycroft, and Sherlock said, “This way,” and led him. The members of the club were panicking and security was falling into place, but they seemed indecisive as to what to do to stop Arthur, and John didn’t blame them. Arthur stormed into the room where Mycroft was, Sherlock and John hot on his heels, then turned and closed the door and dragged a chair up against it with a heavy movement. Then he turned and swiftly, before anyone could have even got a word out, pressed the barrel of his gun precisely between Mycroft’s eyes. 

John tried to decide exactly how insane Arthur was, and if he should step forward, but Mycroft just said calmly, “Ah, yes, I was expecting you.” 

“Where is he?” Arthur asked flatly. 

“Eames and I renegotiated your deal,” said Mycroft, still sounding calm and even and completely unruffled. 

“No, you didn’t,” Arthur responded. “Because Eames is an idiot and therefore incapable of entering into deals by himself. Now tell me where he is.” 

“The deal was expressly to keep you safe,” Mycroft continued. 

“Right,” Arthur agreed tightly. “Because Eames makes fucking stupid deals.” 

“If I tell you where he is, I’ll violate the terms of my deal with him.” 

“You tell me where he is, and I’ll make sure Eames doesn’t shoot you. You don’t tell me where he is, and I’ll shoot you right now, and don’t even think about moving a muscle, John, if you think I can’t take out Mycroft and you before anyone gets into this room, then you clearly haven’t read Mycroft’s files on me.” 

Arthur said it without even glancing in John’s direction, without taking his eyes off of Mycroft, and John froze, indecisive, unsure what he was supposed to do. He didn’t want to make the situation worse, and he felt as if Arthur was on a hair-trigger at the moment. 

“He’s with Moriarty,” Mycroft told Arthur. 

“Obviously,” Arthur bit out. “Obviously I know that. The question is where Moriarty is.” 

“A question I would gladly answer without a gun against my forehead,” Mycroft said. 

There was a tense moment of silence, and then Arthur lowered the gun slowly, and John breathed a sigh of relief. 

Sherlock said, “Can we just go to Moriarty now?” 

***

Everything that was happening was dreadfully unorthodox. Mycroft had gone way off the rule book. He was ignoring his mobile, and he’d locked his PA out of the little antechamber facing Moriarty’s room. Arthur was already heading into the room, frowning at Eames and Moriarty, sound asleep on either side of the PASIV. John and Sherlock were following him, mostly because Sherlock was following the action and John was following Sherlock because that was what John did. 

Mycroft said, “The deal with Eames.” 

Arthur sighed heavily, as he was going through the actions of hooking himself up to the PASIV. “Forget about the deal with Eames.” 

“You’re going under?” Sherlock said to Arthur. 

“I have to go under,” Arthur answered shortly. “I don’t know what Moriarty’s doing to him and I don’t want to traumatize him. If I kick him out of it, the dream will linger. If I go in, I have some hope of mitigating the effects of whatever Moriarty’s doing to his head.” 

“I should go, too,” Sherlock said, predictably. 

“No,” Mycroft told him sharply, and then turned back to Arthur. “The deal with Eames was that Moriarty would be dead at the end of it.” Mycroft felt rather than saw both John and Sherlock look at him abruptly. 

Arthur, in the process of arranging himself next to Eames, also looked up at Mycroft, then nodded once. “Done.” Then he pressed the button. 

Sherlock whirled on Mycroft. “You made a deal with criminals to have Moriarty killed?” 

“I did what I had to do,” Mycroft informed him stiffly. “They’re going to do the best they can, but then my debt is fulfilled, and then I can do what I should have done a long time ago, which is to get rid of Moriarty.” 

“To _protect_ me?” Sherlock drawled scathingly, sounding dreadfully offended to learn of such an impulse even existing. 

“And what would be so terrible about that?” Mycroft demanded, trying to stay calm but finding it, as always, difficult when faced with Sherlock’s illogical obstinacy. 

“It’s _unnecessary_. I can take care of myself. Moriarty isn’t going to—”

“As long as Moriarty is alive, you and he will never be done,” Mycroft cut in. “And as long as you and he are not done, then the rest of the world is caught in the crossfire. This isn’t only about you.” 

“Only mostly,” Sherlock retorted hotly. 

“To the extent that I don’t wish to lock you up, too, because you’re my brother, yes,” Mycroft rejoined. 

And then John inserted, his voice quiet with conviction, “I have to go in.” 

Mycroft and Sherlock both stared at him, shocked into momentary silence. And then they both said, “What?” at the same moment. 

“I have to go into the dream.” John looked evenly at Sherlock. 

Sherlock continued to stare at him in astonishment. “You want to go into the dream?” 

“No. I don’t. But I don’t have an option. It’s got to be a warzone in there, right? Isn’t that what they said it would be like? I can’t leave them by themselves in there.” 

“I thought you didn’t care about them.” 

John looked at Mycroft then. “Eames went in by himself to save Arthur?” 

Mycroft nodded. 

“And then Arthur went in by himself to save Eames. You don’t leave people like that on the battlefield, Sherlock. You go in and you get them yourself.”

“You can’t go in by yourself,” Sherlock snapped. “You don’t even like dreaming. And how are you ever going to navigate Moriarty’s head?” 

“Well, I’ll—” 

“No,” Sherlock cut him off. “You’re not going in there alone. I’m going in there with you.” 

“Sherlock—”

“No,” interrupted Mycroft wearily. “He’s right.” 

Sherlock, clearly getting ready to protest what Mycroft was saying, swallowed it abruptly. “You…I’m right? You think I’m right?” 

“If John’s going in, you obviously have to accompany him,” said Mycroft stiffly. 

“Mycroft—” John began the protest, even as Sherlock sent John a smug look. 

“No,” Mycroft said sharply. “I will not be responsible for allowing anything to happen to you when Sherlock could protect you. Arthur wouldn’t let anything harm Eames, and you won’t let anything harm them because of that impulse, and so Sherlock cannot be prevented from ensuring that nothing will harm you. Consider how you could ask him to stand by and watch harm come to you.” 

There was a long tense moment of silence. 

“Can you work that thing?” John asked Sherlock finally. 

Sherlock nodded once, briefly, and said, “Let’s go.”


	27. Chapter 27

Chapter 27

Eames tipped his head at the painting in front of him. It was a Magritte. And next to it was a Raphael. And next to that was a Manet. 

Eames took a step backward and looked around him at the gallery he was standing in. A museum, he thought. Large and airy. The room marble, the paintings expensive, if oddly arranged. A weird mix. What museum put paintings together this way? Eames considered, drawing a blank. 

And then finally Eames arrived at the more important question: How had he got there? 

Eames reached for his pocket to check his totem, and that was when Arthur distracted him by running full-tilt into the room. 

“What—” Eames began. 

Arthur ran straight at him, barreled into him, knocked him down. Eames’s head hit the marble floor with a bang that resonated within him, but before he could curse at Arthur, he felt heat whoosh over them, the percussive _thud_ , the shaking of the room all around them, independent of Eames’s head bang.

Arthur rolled off of him, and Eames sat up gingerly, sniffing at the acrid smell of smoke filling the air. He could _hear_ the fire crackling. He looked around in horror at all the masterpieces on the wall and then said to Arthur, anguished, “What did you _do_?” 

Arthur looked annoyed. “What does it matter?” 

“What does it _matter_? _Arthur_.” He went for the Magritte first, moving quickly, slicing it out of its frame. 

“You’re really going to save the art?” Arthur’s voice was mocking. “ _Really_?” 

“As much of it as I can,” Eames retorted. “How the bloody hell could you—”

“ _Idiot_ ,” Arthur seethed at him, and pulled him away from the Magritte. “We don’t have time for your _stupid sentimentality_.” Arthur practically spit the words at him. 

Eames stared at him, at the fury contorting his face, at the disgust written all over him. Something nibbled at the back of his mind, something about this whole situation. Eames gaped, reaching for the thing that was going to make this make sense, it was almost in his grasp, he could feel it—

“Forget it,” said Arthur flatly. “You deserve it.” 

“Deserve what?” Eames managed, frustrated at the way his thoughts kept scattering when he tried to hold onto them. There was fire rushing its way toward any number of priceless canvases, and he was wasting time trying to understand why Arthur was being impatient with him when Arthur was _always_ impatient. Wasn’t he?

“Deserve to die here, with your stupid art, as if art means _anything_. Stupid and _pointless_.” 

Eames took a step backward as if Arthur had struck him. He wasn’t sure why this seemed so shocking to him; he probably should have expected that that was how Arthur had always felt about Eames being all moony over some old strokes of a paintbrush. “It—” Eames stammered, and looked at the art all around him, and smelled the approaching fire, and felt his heart break with the idea of having to make the decision to just _leave_ it. “Just let me—”

“ _No_ ,” cut in Arthur viciously. 

Eames, who had half-turned toward another painting, turned back to him, surprised. “What?”

Arthur stalked toward him. “No. Absolutely not. I am _so fucking tired_ of all of your _stupid_ pretentions about being an _artist_. As if you have any right to pretend to art when you were born in a literal gutter.” 

Eames stared at him, frozen, feeling shocked and yet also like this entire scene had become inevitable. 

Arthur reached him, pushed right into his personal space, the way he did when he kissed him, the way he did when he fucked him, but what Arthur said was, “You’re a _forger_. Nothing but a _fake_. Everything about you. _Pretending_. Pretending to be good enough for any of this. To be good enough for _me_.” 

“Arthur,” said Eames, the beginning of something, or the end. 

And then Arthur punched him. 

***

An abandoned amusement park. 

“Seriously?” Arthur breathed out loud, and then, thinking grimly of Eames, dreamed himself up a very impressive gun. And a gas mask. 

And then he started running. 

Normally Arthur would have moved through a new dreamscape like this with more finesse. Normally he wouldn’t have wanted to attract the attention of the projections. But this wasn’t a normal situation, and his heart pounded _Eames_ with every beat, and he tried not to think of what might be happening on a second level. Eames was clever and good at his job and maybe Eames would have avoided Moriarty for this long, for long enough that Arthur could get to him and they could get out of here together. 

Arthur didn’t hold out much hope. 

The projections flocked to him, and Arthur ran, letting them run at his heels. Every once in a while one crossed his path, and he either knocked it out of the way with the butt of his gun or just shot, indiscriminately, letting the gun do most of the work for him. Arthur preferred guns with a bit of finesse, guns that required a little skill to operate, but this gun was working just fine for him at the moment. 

Arthur almost started shouting for Eames; certainly he was attracting enough attention as it was. But he held off. Attracting the attention of Moriarty’s projections was one thing. If Moriarty hadn’t realized he was here, Arthur wanted to hold him off for as long as possible. 

Arthur ran past Ferris wheels and gruesome carnival games, not thinking much about any of them. He tried to consider where Moriarty might keep his secrets, where Eames might head, but in the end he didn’t have to because the projections led him straight there. They were guarding the building like it was a fucking fort. 

Arthur looked at his gun, looked back at the building, then considered that Eames might be inside so he couldn’t just destroy it; he had to get inside the building and then he had to find some way to keep the projections out. 

Arthur looked at the roof of the building. 

“Dream bigger, Arthur,” he muttered to himself, and then he took off, aiming his gun and shooting one projection, then two, before breaking through and running straight up the building. The laws of physics bent for him, and he thought of Mal’s original invitation into dreamsharing, of that logic all his own. He felt, somehow, like he’d come full circle. 

He hit the roof and turned immediately, shooting wildly into the crowd of projections. And then he started building, hard and desperate. Normally Arthur dreamed carefully, elegantly, painting what he needed with what he liked to think was classy practicality. But now he built sloppy and fast: a wall, titanium. He put it up right in the middle of some projections, splitting them in two, watching their bodies be vivisected dramatically. He built and built, sending it around the building, as he shot at the projections caught on his side of the wall, and finally he seamed two halves of the wall together and found himself surrounded by titanium. 

It wasn’t going to last long, he thought. It was a foreign building in a dreamscape that wasn’t his, and the projections would be able to tear it down, discard it as an intrusion. But it would buy him time, time he needed. He’d get to Eames and he’d get them out before the wall fell. 

Arthur dreamed himself a rope and rappelled himself down the building, and then into the building itself. There were a couple of projections inside, and he shot them down while barely looking at them, focused instead on Eames and Moriarty, both hooked up to a PASIV, both sound asleep. 

Clanging came from the outside, the projections attacking his titanium wall. Arthur was a good builder, even in a foreign dreamscape. Arthur could keep the titanium up for a while. 

If he stayed in the dream. 

But he couldn’t stay in the dream because he had to go down another level to retrieve Eames. He was loathe to just kick him out of the dream without knowing what was happening in it. He remembered being unceremoniously kicked out of the dream Sherlock had subjected him to, where he had been kneeling next to Eames’s lifeless body. The dream had lingered, he’d had a tough time shaking it, and Sherlock had supposedly been holding back. If Moriarty was really letting Eames have it, Arthur needed to try to expose the unreality of the dream from within it, get it to ease its hold over Eames’s subconscious. 

So Arthur hooked himself up to the PASIV as quickly as possible. He’d get into the second level, he’d stop whatever Moriarty was doing, he’d fix it, and then he’d kick them both up here and they’d deal with the projections together. 

Arthur looked over at the door, toward his titanium wall, and dreamed it as many reinforcements as he could, and then said, out loud, as if it would help, “Please hold.” 

Then he pressed the button. 

He was in a…museum? It looked like a darkened museum. At night, after it had closed. And… Arthur sniffed the air, listening. And it was on fire. 

“Eames!” he shouted, running out of the room and into the rest of the museum. The hallway was burning merrily, but he dreamed himself buckets of water and began using them to put the fire out, as much as he could. “Eames!” he called again, coughing through the smoke, frantic with how long it was taking him to get out of this hallway he was trapped in. 

Eventually he was able to get through, and he dodged in and out of rooms, finally reaching one where Eames was cornered up against a wall by someone, taking an absolute beating. 

Arthur ran over and pulled the assailant off of Eames. 

And found himself looking into his own face. 

***

The thing about Arthur was that when he was fighting—when he was _really fighting_ —Eames was almost at a disadvantage. He weighed more, and that should have given him the ability to throw Arthur back, but Arthur knew that he weighed more and so Arthur fought cleverly, keeping Eames from being able to turn the tables on him. 

And, furthermore, Eames wasn’t sure he really wanted to fight Arthur this way. He felt, underneath it all, too bewildered to gather himself together to fight back. Because Arthur had turned on him viciously, single-mindedly, and Eames didn’t know what to do with a world where Arthur hated him as much as Arthur seemed to hate him. He was too busy trying to wrap his mind around that, as Arthur’s punches landed home and Eames found himself backing up against the wall, his position so defensive it was hopeless. 

Until the moment when Arthur was pulled off of him by…Arthur. 

Eames looked between the two Arthurs, confused. The Arthur who had been hitting him looked belligerent, defiant, in the other Arthur’s grip. The other Arthur looked momentarily startled, and then closed his lips into a tight, grim line and swung up a semi-automatic and shot the first Arthur in the face. 

Eames flinched at the shot, watched the first Arthur crumple to the ground dead, and then the second Arthur was on top of him, and Eames braced for a punch, trying to determine what was going on here, but Arthur’s hands framed his face, gently, avoiding the worst of the bruises. 

“Eames,” he said, his voice harsh but not cruel the way the first Arthur’s had been. “Eames, look at me. _Eames_.” 

Eames tore his gaze away from the dead Arthur on the floor to the living Arthur in front of him. 

Arthur reached into his jacket pocket, and Eames braced himself, but Arthur pulled out his die and held it out to him. “Roll it,” he said. 

Eames blinked at the die stupidly for a moment, then shook off his paralysis and grabbed the die and rolled it, letting it clatter to the marble floor. They both looked down at it as it settled. Two. 

“It’s supposed to roll a four,” Eames remembered, and the recollection seemed hazy and distant, pulled from a life he hadn’t even lived, he wasn’t sure he hadn’t dreamed that fact. 

“Right. In reality. This is a dream, Eames.” 

_A dream_ , thought Eames. Which would explain…everything, including the two Arthurs. And he should have realized that so much sooner. He was a _dreamsharer_ , for Christ’s sake. He should have realized…

“You’re being drugged, right?” said Arthur insistently. “Moriarty got into your brain and is twisting it. Stay with me here, okay? It’s a dream. It’s just a dream.”

“Moriarty.” Eames echoed the name, wrapped it around his brain. _Moriarty_. How had he _forgotten_? 

“Yes. I would _never_ , okay? You know that, right? Are you listening to me? Eames, I would _never_.” 

Eames had turned his head, listening for the fire, but the museum was silent. The smell of smoke still hung in the air but it was dissipating. He turned back to Arthur. “Did you put out the fire?” 

“Of course I put out the fire, Eames.” 

Which somehow was the thing that made it all better for Eames. He sagged against the wall in relief and said, “If you ever bloody tell me to just leave a Magritte to go up in flames again,” he started, pushing his hair off his face. Which hurt like hell. Stupid dream. 

Arthur said, “We have to—”

And then Arthur died, dropped like a stone directly to the floor. 

Eames blinked down at his body for a startled moment. Then he swooped down, rolled Arthur’s die again—six—and stood, tucking it into his pocket. Then he dreamed himself a gun. “Fuck this,” he said to his two dead Arthurs, and thought, _Moriarty_. 

***

“An abandoned amusement park,” John said. “Just when you think Moriarty can’t get any creepier.” 

Sherlock was barely paying attention to the abandoned amusement park all around them. He’d already started walking confidently. John followed, trying to shake off his unsettled dream feeling. How did Arthur and Eames _do_ this all the time? He hated this feeling. 

“We’re going to find Eames and Arthur, and we’re going to get them out,” John said to the brick wall of Sherlock, since that was about the amount of attention he was getting. “We’re not going to try to get at anything in Moriarty’s brain.” 

Sherlock stopped walking, surveying the amusement park. 

“Sherlock,” John said more insistently. “Are you listening to me?” 

“This is just for show,” Sherlock said, continuing to walk. “He’s not going to keep anything here. It unsettles people, so this is what he shows them. This isn’t really his head.”

“Great,” said John. “I don’t care. Where do you think Eames and Arthur are?”

“They’re not here, obviously. They’ll already be on the second level. Which is where we have to get.” 

“The second level?” echoed John.

“Next dream down, John,” Sherlock replied impatiently. “We have to find the PASIV and join them— Oh, there you go. That looks interesting.” 

John frowned at what looked like some kind of metal wall they’d come across. “What is it?” 

Sherlock drew a hand down the clean, sharp edge of it and said, “Arthur.” 

“Arthur?” 

“Moriarty wouldn’t build this, look at it. This is Arthur.” Sherlock walked along the wall, trailing a hand along it. 

“Why would Arthur build a wall in Moriarty’s amusement park? Is he trying to keep something in?” 

“Or trying to keep something out,” Sherlock said. “Anyways, doesn’t matter now.” They had rounded a corner, and Sherlock nodded at where the wall had given way, breaking down into rubble. “Whatever’s out is in, or whatever’s in is out.” 

“Either way, not good,” said John. 

“Dream yourself a gun, John,” Sherlock said. 

“What?” John asked blankly. He just didn’t _understand_ the way things happened in dreams. 

Sherlock handed him a gun from out of nowhere. “Let’s go.” 

“Behind the scary wall?” John said, and watched Sherlock step through the fallen rubble. “Of course,” he muttered, and followed. 

He lost sight of Sherlock, disappearing ahead of him in the gloom. The building they entered was dark, and John blinked, trying to adjust his vision, and then all the lights came on, and two things happened almost simultaneously: John recognized that they were in the pool where the confrontation with Moriarty had taken place, and there was a gunshot. 

John shifted automatically, firing his gun straight into the person who had just fired his gun. The person fell immediately, John’s aim as true as it always was, and John lowered his gun, swearing. 

“Who did I just kill?” John demanded. 

“A projection,” Sherlock answered. “Doesn’t matter.” He was moving over to where the projection had been, and John followed. 

Arthur had been the victim of the gunshot wound, straight between the eyes. John followed the line of the needle in his vein to the PASIV, to which Moriarty and Eames were both hooked up. 

“What happens to Arthur now?” John asked. 

“Presumably he just woke up in real life. We’ll see if he comes back. In the meantime, he’s clearly left us with the task of saving Eames.” 

“Can’t we just wake him up?”

“You heard Arthur; that could damage him irrevocably.” Sherlock was now fetching another needle from the PASIV, grabbing a vial of Somnacin with something approaching glee. 

John said, “You just want to get into Moriarty’s head.” 

Sherlock looked at him. “I want to go after Eames. Isn’t that what you said?” 

John thought of Eames who loved Arthur, who had gone and done this stupid thing just to save Arthur, and felt an ache of sympathetic kinship that he didn’t want to examine but which meant that he couldn’t—just _couldn’t_ —leave Eames all alone, knowing what he knew about him. 

Sherlock took his silence for the reluctant acquiescence it was, and said, “Exactly,” and stuck the needle into his vein with alarming efficiency. 

John said, “I’ll come, too.” 

“You can’t,” Sherlock said. “You need to stay here to keep the projections away from us. It’s what Arthur was trying to do with the wall. Stay here, shoot anyone who shows up. Unless it’s Arthur again. He might be helpful.” And then Sherlock pressed the button. 

And John said, “Sherlock, wait,” because suddenly there were a million things he felt like he needed to say to Sherlock, but it didn’t matter, Sherlock was gone. 

***

Arthur woke to Mycroft, and said, “Fuck.” 

“Things not going well?” asked Mycroft, looking concerned. 

Arthur said, “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, _fuck_ ,” and reached for the Somnacin with jerky movements, looking at his watch as he went, estimating dream time—and then pausing. He looked at John and Sherlock’s sleeping bodies, then looked over at Mycroft. “They’re in the dream?” 

Mycroft looked more concerned. “You didn’t see them?” 

“No, we must have been on different levels,” Arthur said, and pressed the button, because he didn’t have time to reassure Mycroft at that moment. 

Right. Abandoned amusement park. He knew this bit, and he didn’t have the fucking _time_. He dreamed himself up a Bugatti— _dream bigger, Arthur_ —and used it to run over several projections and screech his way through the stupid carnival games. It wasn’t necessary to wreck the amusement park, but he wanted to fucking _destroy_ the thing. 

There was a hole in his titanium wall when he got there, which was clearly what had gotten him kicked out of the dream, and he swung out of his car and launched a couple of grenades at the swarming projections and stalked his way into the swimming pool. 

And found himself in the sights of John Watson’s gun. 

Arthur lifted his own gun up in the air in a gesture that wasn’t surrender so much as _I’m not going to shoot you; I think we’re kind of on the same side._

John lowered his gun and said, “You’re not a projection, are you?”

“No,” Arthur said, walking over to the dreamers and frowning down at them. 

“How would I know?” 

“You wouldn’t.”

“Comforting,” said John. 

“Sherlock left you here to guard.” 

“Yes.” 

Arthur manhandled his own dead body out of the way. 

“Sorry about that. We got here a second too late.” 

“There are worse ways to die and I’ve done all of them,” Arthur said, and handed John his gun. “You’re going to need a better gun than that. Actually.” Arthur walked back out to the hole in his titanium wall, frowned at it, and then built a tank. Then he walked back into the swimming pool. “Now you’ve got a tank.” 

John blinked. “Hang on, I’ve got a what?” 

“A tank,” Arthur said, and walked over to the PASIV and pulled out more Somnacin. He heard John’s steps retreat out of the swimming pool, then come back in. 

“There’s a bloody _tank_ out there,” John said. 

“I know, I made it. It’s a good tank. Really comfortable leather seats. That’s the problem with standard tanks, not enough leather seats.” 

“Are you for real?” John asked him. 

“It’s a dream, John. That’s some kind of metaphysical question and Eames is much better at those than I am, so I’m going to go and retrieve him and you are going to blow to fucking shreds any projections that try to get anywhere near this place. How’s that?” 

“I’ve handled a real-life war,” John informed him. “I think I can handle a dream one.” 

Arthur grinned at him. “That’s what I like to hear, Captain.” He pressed the button. 

***

Sherlock stood in a room with a single Leonardo da Vinci painting lit up under a spotlight. He tipped his head to look at the painting and waited. Because he knew what Eames and Arthur had missed, and that was that Moriarty would find _him_. 

“A museum,” he said, when he heard the footsteps behind him. “You did that for Eames.” 

“Of course I did,” said Moriarty. “He’s obvious, that one. He’s in love with two things: art and Arthur.” 

“So you gave them both to him, and then you took them both away.” Sherlock turned to face Moriarty, hands still clasped behind his back. “Or tried to.” 

“Yes, well, Arthur’s an annoying little pet like your John. But they’re all distractions, aren’t they? Little gnats.” Moriarty was circling Sherlock warily. 

So Sherlock stayed still and let him, trying to keep an upper hand in someone else’s brain. 

“What would you have? If it was your brain?” Moriarty asked. “A palace. Isn’t that what you tell people?” 

“What’s relevant is what you have in yours.” 

“You’ve seen mine already.” 

Sherlock smiled, thin and without humor. “I’ve seen what you want me to see.” 

“And isn’t that all that exists in the universe? What people want you to see? What you want John to see? What John doesn’t want to see? All locked up in the palace of your mind?” Moriarty finally stopped moving, standing close enough that Sherlock could see how unlined his face was. Dream Moriarty was vain, Sherlock thought. “Palace…or prison?” 

“The prison’s you, Moriarty. Locked in a prison right now. You’re not getting out, you know. You might as well show me what you’ve got. This is your last opportunity to show off.” 

Moriarty smiled like Sherlock had said something funny and took a step back. “He tried to pretend to be you, you know.” 

“He didn’t pull it off?” 

“He held a gun better than you do.” 

“Criminals always miss some detail,” said Sherlock with casual iciness. 

Moriarty’s smile widened. “Want to know a secret?” He stepped up close to Sherlock again, whispered in his ear. “You’d have London for your dreamscape. And so would I. We’re alike, you and I. So alike. So much more alike than your brother, or John, wish to realize. But you’ve known all along. You knew you’d get here inside my brain and you’d _recognize_ it.” 

Moriarty stepped back, and there was London all around them, vivid and unmistakable. 

“Every back alley, perfect, to your specifications. It’s the map that lives in your head: London. The beat of it. We’d die without it, you and I. Without all those anonymous people with all their petty problems, all their pointless emotions, all their vicious, delicious _crimes_. And I know, of course, where you lock everything most precious to you in your London. It isn’t Baker Street at all. It’s right here.” 

Sherlock looked at the view all around them and knew, immediately, that they were on the roof of St. Bart’s.


	28. Chapter 28

Chapter 28

Eames was stalking down hallways shouting Moriarty’s name in the very antithesis of _subtle  
_ when the museum disappeared all around him. He looked around warily to find himself…in London. _London_. Not far from where he’d been born. Not far from where he’d learned to pick pockets. 

Eames did a slow circle, looking for projections and seeing no one. He was in an absolutely deserted London. Someone had changed the dream. But who? And why? 

He hesitated. Maybe tracking down Moriarty here wasn’t worth it. Maybe he should just kick himself out and then out again, back to the real world, and then shoot him in the head. He’d given this whole thing a try and it had gone poorly, and yes, he should absolutely just—

The car came wheeling around the corner in a dramatic slide and screeched to a halt next to him. It was a ridiculously flashy gleaming silver Bugatti. Eames gaped at it, forgetting to aim his gun, and then the door opened and Arthur snapped, “Are you getting in?” 

Eames thought of Arthur punching the life out of him and said, “No,” and raised his gun a bit. 

Arthur sighed and rolled his eyes and stalked completely out of the car. “Put down the gun,” he said. “I don’t have time to go back out and come back in.” 

“Arthur, pet, don’t take this the wrong way, but you’ve been sending mixed signals recently in this dream,” Eames said, his gun still steady. 

“Eames,” Arthur said in exasperation, and then shoved Eames’s gun hand out of his way—because Eames was just _bad_ at shooting Arthur, apparently—and walked him right back up against the wall and trapped his face between his hands and kissed him hard, pressing into him meaningfully. 

Eames, after a wary second, kissed back, and the kiss shifted, tipped from proving a point into just a kiss, lingering and almost lazy. 

“How’s that for a signal?” Arthur asked, and licked his way back into Eames’s mouth. 

“Didn’t quite catch it,” Eames said. “Try again?” 

Arthur leaned away from him with a smirk, a tiny crease of dimples. “Put the gun away and get in my car.” Then he walked away. 

Eames put the gun away and got in his car. 

“A Bugatti, Arthur?” 

“Someone told me once I should dream a little bigger.” 

“Right. But a _Bugatti_?” 

Arthur shifted and went wheeling down the street, madcap as always. “Who changed the dream to London?” 

“Not me. I can’t get a handle on this bloody dream.” 

“Because he dosed you with a lot of drugs. It’s okay, I’m only going to tease you a little bit about this when we get topside.” Arthur flashed more dimples at him. 

Eames said, “I liked you better before we shagged,” because then Arthur didn’t do things like tease him with dimples for being an idiot, he just yelled at him. 

Arthur laughed. “Anyway, the teasing is going to happen after I kill you.” 

“Oh, good, so I’ll be dead for the teasing, then.” 

“What the _fuck_ , Eames, could you possibly have been thinking to go to Mycroft and—”

“Oh, thank God, projections,” breathed Eames, and put his window down so he could lean out and aim his gun at their pursuing car. His first shot went wide just as Arthur hit a pothole. “Darling, could you possibly drive this car a little better?” 

“Not really, because it turns out I’ve got my own situation here,” said Arthur, as Eames looked up in time to see a car slam into them on their left. The car careened, and Arthur grabbed for Eames, tugging him in at the same moment Eames realized he was about to be crushed by a lamppost. 

He ducked back into the car and covered his head from the rain of glass as the back window was shot in. 

“ _Fuck_ ,” said Arthur, wheeling the car back around, “this is a fucking _Bugatti_ they’re terrorizing here.” 

“You probably should have gone for a Fiat,” Eames suggested, dreaming himself a bigger gun. “Better in tight spaces.” 

“Shut up and shoot one of them, would you?” Arthur snapped. 

Eames crawled over the front seat into the back seat, jostling Arthur, who swore ill-temperedly at him, but Eames ignored him because Arthur had a weakness for a good car and was clearly irritated that his driving had not been enough to save the Bugatti. Eames finished clearing out the glass from the back and sprawled out enough to aim his gun. 

“Cover me, love,” he said. 

“I can’t cover you, I’m _driving_ ,” Arthur said, but he gamely fired his gun blindly out the window anyways, and that was why Eames loved him. 

Eames aimed and shot and took out the first car, the second car, the third. Then he crawled back into the front seat. “Target practice,” he told Arthur. 

“Show-off,” said Arthur, and sent him a brief scowl. “We need to find Sherlock.”

“Sherlock? He’s in this dream? Why?”

“Who the hell knows? To make my life _difficult_? Because this has been the worst fucking job to run point on in the history of time because nobody _listens_ to me? I can’t close my eyes two seconds without you going behind my back to be _stupid_ and ending up in some art museum and then the next thing I know it’s _London_ and you can’t dream up GPS, you know.” 

“GPS?” Eames echoed, having lost the thread of Arthur’s complaints. 

“To find you!” 

“How _did_ you find me?” 

“You were in the area of London you grew up in,” Arthur said. “I lucked out.” 

“Your intel is so good that you know what _area_ of London I grew up in.” 

“Eames, it’s my _job_.” 

“I want you to know that if we weren’t in a dream right now I’d go down on you right this instant because I find you fucking hot when you terrify me, and oh my God, I _have_ been drugged.” 

“Fuck,” said Arthur. 

“I can’t do that while you’re driving. I’m good, but I’m not _that_ good.” 

“No.” Arthur cut sharply to the left, sending Eames against the side of the car. “We need a plan. I can’t just drive us aimlessly around this place; we’re going to get ourselves killed and we need to get Sherlock out of here before Moriarty can do whatever the hell it is he does.” 

“I have an idea.” 

“God help us,” groaned Arthur. 

Eames leaned forward and kissed his cheek. 

Arthur glared at him. “What the hell was that?” 

“Keep the car running, darling,” said Eames, and shot himself in the head. 

***

John didn’t know what the hell he was supposed to do with a _tank_. But it did a good job of filling the hole in the wall and it looked intimidating, so John was just sitting with a gun on his lap watching sleeping people and feeling itchy from being in the dream when Eames’s eyes blinked open. 

“Okay,” he said, sitting up and pulling the needle out of his vein. “Good.” He smiled. “Hello.” 

“You’re okay,” John said, because hadn’t this all been about finding Eames, and now Eames was here and _fine_ and everyone else was still missing. 

“I am indeed okay, except for the fact that Arthur’s never going to let me live down that I got myself all turned upside-down about being in a dream. Now for more important matters. You’re holding off the projections with that gun?” Eames looked at it distastefully, as if he feared for John’s sanity. 

“And a tank,” John said a little defensively. 

“A _tank_?” Eames repeated, sounding alarmed, and John gestured over to it. 

Eames disappeared out the door, then came back and said, “Arthur made that.” 

“How do you know I didn’t?” asked John, somewhat hurt by the assumption. 

“Because it has a leather seat and that’s Arthur all over. Okay, I’m going to take over here.” Eames walked over to the PASIV, fiddling with it. 

“What? Why?” 

Eames turned back to John, holding up a needle and a vial of Somnacin that he waggled at him. “Because you’re going into the dream.” 

“ _I_ am?”

“To find Sherlock.” 

John set his jaw. “You lost Sherlock?” 

“I never even _saw_ Sherlock. What Sherlock did was distract Moriarty for us. That means Arthur’s got room to maneuver in the dream, but he’s got to grab Sherlock and make sure he gets out, which means finding him, wherever he and Moriarty are most likely to be. So you’ve got to go in there and find him. When you get there, send up a flare. Arthur will spot it and come and retrieve you. Shoot any projections you see, but Arthur will get to you quickly. He’s driving a bloody Bugatti like an idiot.” 

“How’m I going to send up a flare?” John asked, watching Eames slide the needle into his vein as if he had actual medical training. Everything was happening very quickly, and all he could think was _Sherlock is missing in Moriarty’s brain_ and he had _known_ this was going to happen. 

“What are you talking about? Dream one up when you get there.” 

“I can’t do that the way you lot can,” John said. 

“Yes, you can.” Eames looked at him. “It’s all in your head. _All_ of it. Yeah?” Eames gave him a wink and a smile. And then he hit the button. 

***

London looked exactly like London, except that it was deserted. Which was actually _more_ creepy than a deserted amusement park. John hated Moriarty’s brain. 

And Sherlock was missing. In this hellish, terrifying London. Missing, with Moriarty. _Damn it._

John squeezed his eyes shut and thought and thought and _thought_ about holding a flare gun, but none appeared in his hands and he wanted to scream in frustration. He had to get to Sherlock, he _had to_ \--if Sherlock ended up like Sarah Miller, he didn’t know what he would do, he didn’t know how he would _take_ it--and then he opened his eyes and the sky above him was literally _lit up_ with green and red explosions, like he’d fired a dozen flares into the air. John stared at it in wonder. 

A Bugatti squealed its way down the street he was on, and the passenger door opened, and John jumped in before the car had stopped, meaning that Arthur accelerated neatly. 

“Was _that_ necessary?” Arthur gestured back at the fireworks display in the air. “You’re going to get every fucking projection in this dream on us.” Arthur took a corner going much too fast. 

“I didn’t know what was going on,” John defended himself. 

Arthur ignored him in favor of almost running directly into a shop before abruptly veering away from it. “You talked to Eames?” 

“He says Sherlock’s missing?” 

“Sherlock’s somewhere in this London. We have to find him. I need ideas of where to look. Where would Sherlock go? I’ve already been to Baker Street, and he’s not there. Where else, John?”

John forced down his sense of rising panic. _This is a battlefield, John_ , he told himself. _Just a battlefield. You know how to do this_. But never on any battlefield had there been _Sherlock_ at stake, and the fact of it terrified him. He pushed the adrenaline away, waited to settle back into something _productive_. 

“New Scotland Yard,” he said. 

“Tell me how to get there,” Arthur said. 

John directed, and Arthur drove like a maniac, at one point leaning entirely out of the car to launch a grenade at a pursuing car of projections and then narrowly avoiding driving off a bridge in the aftermath. 

They got to NSY, and John went to jump out, but Arthur pulled him back in, shaking his head. “This isn’t it.” 

“How do you know?” 

“No projections. Where else, John?” 

John made a sound of frustration before it dawned on him. “St. Bart’s,” he said to Arthur. “He loves St. Bart’s.” 

***

“You’d come here to die,” Moriarty remarked, looking down at the street from the roof, and Sherlock thought about pushing him off, then remembered they were in a dream and it wouldn’t really matter. Moriarty straightened, turned back to him. “If you had to, if you could choose the place, you’d jump off this roof.” Moriarty smiled chillingly and walked over to him. “Would you ring John, do you think? Leave him a note?” 

“This is a dream, Moriarty. It’s all literally a dream. It’s pointless,” said Sherlock, affecting boredom. 

“No, it isn’t. And you know it’s not. You see what Arthur and Eames know to be true. The dream is everything. _Everything_. The dream is more real than the life. Who you are in the dream is more real than the life. Who you are in _your_ dream, Sherlock.”

“What? Here? In this version of London you’ve created?” drawled Sherlock. 

Moriarty gave him one of his reptilian smiles. “Deeper than this.” 

“Deeper?” said Sherlock. “Another level down.”

“Deeper even than that. Have you ever heard of limbo?” 

“Limbo,” said Sherlock, trying not to let his confusion show. “Caught between two places.” 

“Between two states of being. Or being trapped in a dream. That’s what they call it. When you’re so far down that the dream is you and you are the dream. You can do anything in limbo, Sherlock. Make anything. Be anything. You can stay there for centuries, and come back to find only a few minutes have gone by. You can live the life you’ve always wanted. The one you don’t even let into your dreams.” Moriarty circled him, and Sherlock looked out over his London, still and unmoving, trying not to look like he was listening. 

“You could let yourself think of it. More than that, you could actually _live_ it. If John was yours, if he looked at you with his heart in his eyes, if he took you to bed and slept every night with you and woke up every morning and did it all over again. All those fondest little hopes and wishes of your brain. No more women to share him with, no more fear he’ll leave you.”

Sherlock squeezed his eyes shut and _didn’t want to listen_. 

“You can live whole lifetimes down there, Sherlock. Everything you want. It’s the ultimate. Everything there is to know. Everything you could ever want to know. All of it, there, waiting for you, if you just reach out and grab it.” Moriarty was close, Sherlock could sense him now, and he spoke directly into Sherlock’s ear. “Don’t you want to know what John Watson sounds like when he says it, just once? _I love you_.” 

***

St. Bart’s was surrounded by crowds that looked to be in the middle of a protest. 

“What are they protesting?” John asked. 

“Us,” said Arthur grimly, and rammed the Bugatti into the crowd. This provoked chaos, some of the people screaming as they scrambled to get out of the way, others of them turning instead to attack the car. Arthur kept driving, and John tried to ignore the sounds of the bodies thumping up against their car as Arthur pushed them out of the way. 

He drove directly up the steps before skidding to a stop and saying to John, “All right, you’re going in there. I’m going to stay here and see if I can get us some relief from these projections.” 

“What am I going to do?” 

“If you find him hooked up to a PASIV, wait for me; I don’t want to just kick him out. If you don’t find him hooked up to a PASIV, shoot him in the head and get out of this fucking dream.” 

John nodded and rolled himself out of the car, and behind him he heard Arthur setting off explosions. John decided he didn’t even want to know what Arthur was up to. He set himself the task of running through St. Bart’s, shouting for Sherlock. He went through every floor, unable to find him, until all that was left was the roof. 

John stumbled out onto it, looked at the sleeping Sherlock and Moriarty, and made up his mind right then. 

He lifted his gun and shot it right between Moriarty’s eyes. 

***

Arthur’s tank was _magnificent_. 

Eames was never going to tell him that. Arthur was already too full of himself. 

But Eames was having too much fun by half using the tank to keep the projections away, and he was a little disappointed when one of his dreamers woke up. 

The disappointment faded to anger when he saw it was Moriarty, who didn’t seem to realize that Eames was there until after he’d taken a few steps toward the exit. Eames swung out of his tank and leaped easily to the ground in front of him. 

Moriarty took a step back, then dreamed himself a gun, but Eames had been _born_ for dreamspace, and he was good at it, much better than this miserable little prick, and Eames kicked the gun out of his hand with a clatter and then pressed a taser to Moriarty’s side. Tasers were useful things; Moriarty went down immediately, screaming in pain, and Eames heard the projections start clambering around the tank to get in. 

“Fancy meeting you here,” Eames told Moriarty pleasantly, and then kicked him into the wall. 

***

“What did you do?” Arthur asked, when he pounded his way onto the roof and found John standing over Moriarty’s dead body. 

“Took some initiative,” said John, who had already pulled out a needle from the PASIV. “Set this up for me.” 

Arthur just looked at him. 

“You went in after Eames. I’m going in after Sherlock.” 

“A third-level dream,” Arthur began. 

“It has to be me, Arthur,” John said firmly, and thrust the needle at Arthur. “Do you understand me? Just like it had to be you for Eames.” John hoped he was going to understand without John articulating it any further, because John didn’t know _how_ to articulate it any further, just that if Sherlock needed rescuing from his own head, it had to be John to do it. 

Arthur, after a second, took the needle and walked over to the PASIV and said, “Fine. I’ll cover you. But it’s going to be unstable. Find him and get out. You know how to get out of a dream, right?” Arthur walked back over to John, handed him the needle. 

He threaded his vein himself, then said, “Dying.” 

“Right.” Arthur nodded once, standing by the PASIV again, then said, “Good luck, Dr. Watson.” 

***

He was in the lab in St. Bart’s where he’d met Sherlock. Only it was dark and deserted. John swallowed and moved cautiously out of the lab, wondering if he was in the wrong place entirely, if he was going to have to track Sherlock down in London again. 

He went up to the roof, where Sherlock had been last time, because he might as well, and if Sherlock wasn’t there, maybe he could get the lay of the land and figure out where to go from there, whether this was really a London facsimile he was in or something else entirely. 

Sherlock was there. He was sitting in the middle of the roof, his coat tucked around him. The sky was gray, the clouds heavy, and the wind was biting. As John walked across the roof to him, a couple of places began to cave in, and John stepped gingerly, thinking, _Unstable dream_. 

“Sherlock,” John said, when he got closer, and Sherlock startled and looked at him. 

Shock was written all over his face. “John,” he said, as if John had been the last person he’d expected to appear. 

“Come on,” John said, stepping around another crumbling piece of roof. “I’ve come to get you out of here.” 

Sherlock blinked at him. “Get me out of here?” 

“It’s a dream,” John said gently. 

“I know it’s a dream, I…” Sherlock looked out over the London skyline, which was dark and gloomy, as if it were post-apocalyptic. “It was supposed to be a good dream. I was supposed to make it a good dream. Except that I couldn’t…” 

“It’s okay,” John said, as it started to rain. “It’s because it’s third-level. Arthur says it’s unstable.” 

“But I think I can get from here into limbo,” Sherlock said, shivering against the rain, pulling his coat tighter against him. “Moriarty was telling me, but then he died.” Sherlock gestured to Moriarty’s body in the corner, which John had missed entirely. 

John turned back to Sherlock. “Why would you want to go to limbo?” 

Sherlock said nothing. 

John said, “Come on, Sherlock. Come home with me, huh?” 

Sherlock turned his head and looked at John closely, carefully. “Home with you?”

“Forget about all of this dream nonsense, Sherlock. Just come home with me. Arthur and Eames are safe now, you distracted Moriarty and Arthur found Eames and they’re okay. So we did what we needed to do. We’ll find ourselves a nice, normal murder. Maybe a serial killer.” John tried a smile, because Sherlock seemed _so sad_ in this heavy, gray London and John hated it. “It’ll be Christmas.” 

Sherlock smiled then, but even the smile was _so sad_. “You don’t really think that.” 

“No, but you do, and that’s enough,” John told him. 

“Is it?” asked Sherlock, still sad. 

“It’s always enough. You’re always enough.” 

Sherlock looked at him for a long moment. Then he sighed and said, “You want me to go back?” 

“Yes. Please. With me.” John held out his hand. 

Sherlock stood with another sigh and took John’s hand and said, “How?” 

John looked out over the roof, looking for a way to die. And then he grinned and said to Sherlock, “We’re going to jump off this building. Together.” 

And they did.


	29. Chapter 29

Chapter 29

Arthur had set up all the explosive charges he could. The staircases leading down from the roof were all completely decimated. And it didn’t matter, because Moriarty’s resourceful projections had pulled out ladders and some kind of complicated rope pulley system. Arthur hated Moriarty’s projections. He stretched out on his belly next to the dreamers he was protecting and aimed his gun at the gaping hole where the staircase had been, and that was when Sherlock and John both clambered out of their chairs. 

Arthur looked at them, then got to his feet. “Oh, thank God. We’re all good?” He looked between them. John looked a little queasy, but then John always looked queasy in a dream. Sherlock looked pensive and reflective and a bit sad, but he didn’t look insane or even terribly traumatized, and that was a good thing. Arthur said, “Okay, well, even if we’re not all good, we need to go.” He went to aim his gun at John.

John held up his hand and said, “Jesus, please, no more guns. I’ve been shot enough.” 

“I need to kill you,” Arthur pointed out reasonably, taking the time to kill an enterprising member of the advance guard of projections. 

John looked at Sherlock and said, “What do you say? Want to jump off another building?” 

And Sherlock actually smiled a little and said, “Absolutely.” 

And then Arthur watched in disbelief as they held hands and ran and sailed off of the building together. 

Then he frowned and said, “I fucking hate heights,” and stuck his gun in his mouth. 

***

“Welcome back,” Eames said to Sherlock and John, and punctuated that with a kick to Moriarty’s groin. 

Sherlock looked a little wide-eyed. 

John said, “Er, what are you doing?” 

“Keeping him alive until we could all regroup and get back together,” Eames replied. “What are _you_ doing?” He narrowed his eyes. “And where’s Arthur?” 

Arthur, on cue, opened his eyes and stood, adjusting his cuffs and pushing his hair back and glancing at Eames. Eames kicked Moriarty’s kneecap. Arthur didn’t even so much as flinch. Damn it, Eames loved him _desperately_. 

“I like your tank,” Eames told him. 

“I like your taser,” Arthur replied, and turned to John and Sherlock. “Ready? Don’t even think about doing something stupid like trying to kill yourself by drowning. Just let me shoot you.” 

“Fine,” John huffed out, and Arthur shot him. 

“It _is_ unimaginative,” Sherlock informed him, and Arthur shot him, too, and turned to Eames. 

“It’s true, imagination isn’t your strong suit, petal,” Eames grinned at him, and kicked Moriarty’s ribcage cheerfully. 

Arthur stalked over to him and kissed him up against the wall and shot Moriarty blindly, without taking his tongue out of Eames’s mouth. 

“You’re going to be the absolute _death_ of me,” Eames informed him, as the dream started collapsing all around them. 

“My pleasure,” said Arthur, and lifted his gun. 

***

The thing was that in the chaos of the return from the dreams and the havoc they had wreaked with the heads of everyone involved, as Eames and Arthur and John and Sherlock and Mycroft testified later, it was impossible to know how Moriarty had died. It _could_ have been the gunshot wound to the head, but there was another to the heart, and also evidence of strangulation. Anyway, Sherlock had testified that the Somnacin that had been used was poisonous in especially large doses and Moriarty had carelessly used a lot of it in the second- and third-level dreams, and if that explanation didn’t quite make sense, it didn’t matter, because nobody seemed to understand about the dreamsharing anyway and just threw their hands up at the whole thing. 

So that, hours later, by the time the questioning was over and they were all back on the street, Mycroft said, “Stop by Baker Street to be paid,” and disappeared into a waiting car. 

Sherlock stopped a taxi and he and John looked back expectantly at Arthur and Eames. 

Arthur told them, “We’ll take the next one.” 

Eames said, “On a scale of one to ten, how angry are you?” 

Arthur looked at the traffic passing them on the street and considered. “A hundred and fifty,” he said. 

“I thought you’d pick at least a million,” Eames remarked, “so I think I’m doing okay.” 

Arthur took a deep breath and felt Eames standing next to him, thought of Eames in the dream, shooting projections out the window as he drove them both, sending John back to him, keeping Moriarty incapacitated. He thought of never having Eames in a dream with him again to do things like that, to depend on and trust, to have on his side. He thought of never having Eames with him, in any capacity, ever again. He thought of losing him forever, all of his terrible clothing and his awful jokes and the stupid, _stupid_ way his lips pouted. 

He hailed a cab and reached for the door when it drew to a stop, and he looked at Eames, at the sheer and utter _perfection_ of him, and he said, “Never, ever, _ever_ do that again.” 

Then he got in the cab and closed the door and said evenly to the cab driver, “Baker Street, please.” 

And then he put his head in his hands and let himself fall a little bit apart. 

***

Mycroft took bank account numbers from Arthur and Eames and made transfers and then ceremoniously burned in the fireplace a large number of files. Arthur and Eames, both uncharacteristically quiet, stood side-by-side and watched them burn. 

And then, when that was done, Eames turned to John and Sherlock and said with forced joviality, “I guess this is good-bye.” 

“No offense,” John said, shaking his hand, “but I really hope not to have to run into you lot again.” 

“You were good at the dreams in the end,” Eames told him. 

“No, I wasn’t,” John said. “But I was good enough.” 

Eames shook Sherlock’s hand. “I tried to forge you, you know.” 

“Moriarty told me.” 

“He knew.” 

“You were too good with a gun.” 

Eames gave a startled laugh, then shrugged. “Ah, well, you win some, you lose some.” He glanced at Arthur, and there was something careful and fragile about the glance, as if they were strangers who had just met. “Ready, Arthur?” The name sounded odd and stilted and formal, nothing like the casual endearments Eames had been throwing in Arthur’s direction ever since Sherlock had met him. 

Sherlock shifted his gaze to Arthur, who looked as odd and stilted and formal as Eames sounded. He said, “It was a pleasure doing business with you.” 

And Sherlock found himself saying, “Could I have a word with you?” 

Arthur looked surprised. So did John. 

Eames, after a moment, said, “I’ll go on ahead, shall I?” 

Arthur nodded a bit, and Eames cleared his throat and left. Mycroft lifted his eyebrows and looked between Arthur and Sherlock. 

“Go away, would you?” Sherlock said to him, and he sighed. 

“Nice to have—” Mycroft began. 

“Please don’t,” Arthur cut him off brusquely. 

“Quite,” Mycroft agreed, and left. 

Sherlock looked at John. “You, too.” 

John looked even more surprised, but then he said, after a moment. “Oh. Right. Okay.” 

Sherlock waited until the door had closed behind John before saying, “You could tell him, you know.” 

Arthur looked almost amused. “Really? Why don’t we both tell them, and then we’ll call each other afterward and gossip about how it turned out?” 

Sherlock shook his head. “I’m serious.” 

“So am I,” Arthur snapped. “It isn’t the sort of thing you say. We aren’t the sort of people who say it.” 

“Maybe we should be,” Sherlock responded. “Maybe we… Maybe we _ought_ to be. What good would it do you now, to pretend that you haven’t said it to him a million times already in a million different ways? What’s one more?” 

“What makes you think you know anything about it?” Arthur snarled. 

“Because I _couldn’t_ do it,” Sherlock retorted. “Even in a _dream_ , I couldn’t do it. It was the whole _point_ of the dream, to tell John, to get John to tell me, and I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t get him to say what I wanted him to say. I never will.”

Arthur blinked steadily at him, no longer looking annoyed. “You don’t know that.” 

“Yes, I do.” Sherlock was aware he sounded bitter and hated that he did, because it didn’t _matter_. John had come and got him, brought him home, _wanted_ him here. And why did it _matter_ if it wasn’t the way Arthur wanted Eames and Eames wanted Arthur? Those were never things that had ever _mattered_ to him. 

“It was a third-level dream, Sherlock, they’re hard things to begin with. And Moriarty was messing with the Somnacin.” 

“He says it in your dreams, doesn’t he?” said Sherlock, and Arthur didn’t say anything, because Arthur didn’t _have_ to. “When you dream him, when you really let yourself dream him, he never stops saying it, does he? It’s not the same, for John and me. It’s not.” 

Arthur put his hands in his pockets. It ruined the line of his suit but Sherlock could see very easily that Arthur wasn’t thinking about that. Arthur said, hesitantly, after a moment, “If I tell him, and I lose him, I think it would kill me.” His voice was raw with honesty, rough with emotion. 

“And you think if you lose him without telling him, it wouldn’t?” Sherlock countered. 

Arthur, after a moment’s consideration, inclined his head in Sherlock’s direction. Sherlock understood: What more could be said? 

Arthur left, and Sherlock settled onto the couch, steepled his fingers against his mouth, and tried to work himself into a good sulk. A good sulk, he though, might distract him. From… _everything_. 

John came back and said, “You can’t possibly be sulking. About losing the ability to keep sparring with Moriarty? I mean, we won, Sherlock. We got out, safe and alive, and he won’t kill any more people, he won’t destroy any more lives. That’s a victory.” 

Sherlock turned his head and looked at John and said, after a moment, “Yes. We won.” 

John sighed. “You could at least pretend to believe that.” 

And that was Sherlock’s problem, wasn’t it? He was horrible at pretending to believe things. He couldn’t even do it in a dream world. 

Sherlock closed his eyes and pretended to be deep in a sulk and John eventually sighed and left. 

***

Arthur got back to the suite to find Eames in the elevator lobby, clearly on his way out, and for a second Arthur just blinked at him in comical astonishment. “Where are you going?” he asked stupidly, as if this was their _house_ or something. 

Eames ran a hand through his hair and scratched the back of his neck and said, “Look. Pet. I don’t want you to think that you—that I—I am really fucking bad at the good-bye part of things, okay?” 

Arthur stared at him. His heart was racing and his breath was short and suddenly Arthur thought he might be having a panic attack. “I need to talk to you,” he said, and he said it all in a gasp because he couldn’t, he couldn’t, he couldn’t let Eames walk through that door and not make sure he _knew_. Maybe he already knew and maybe he was trying to be kind but Arthur was choking on never having said it, on everything he hadn’t said before he’d woken up to a _fucking note_ and the fear that he would never be able to say any of it. 

“Arthur,” Eames said, sounding concerned, and dropped the bag he was holding to reach for Arthur, to hold him up, as if frightened he was going to collapse. “Arthur,” he said sharply, urgently. “Take a breath.” He almost shook him. 

“I think I’m having a panic attack,” Arthur informed him, around his hyperventilation.

“What the _fuck_ ,” said Eames. “Put your head between your knees.”

Arthur shook his head. “No.”

“If you faint and hit your head on this marble—”

“I love you,” said Arthur, and suddenly he could breathe. It was Eames who looked like he couldn’t, he stared at him in silence, and Arthur found himself speaking into it, filling it up with every word he’d always meant to say. “I’ve been in love with you from the first moment. I know it sounds ridiculous, but you were so _you_ , and I am so in love with you that sometimes I can’t think straight, I have to try to keep you at arm’s length because if I didn’t every thought in my head would be you. If I’m working with you you’re the only person I ever see, you’re the only dream I’ve ever wanted. The dream you made me dream that night? With the PASIV? It was you. It’s always been you. It’s only ever been you. And I want everything, Eames. I want you to come home to me, and I want to come home to you, wherever we decide home is, whatever ridiculous corner of the world you want it to be. We’ll sleep together at night and I’ll pretend you don’t snore. I’ll make room in my closets for your terrible clothing. You’ll steal me Titians and I’ll steal you Kandinskys and we’ll wallpaper our bedroom in them. We’ll text each other to complain about other dreamsharers, or to remind each other to pick up milk. And sometimes when we’re lonely on opposite sides of the world we’ll call each other. Do you get it? I want you, and I want me, and I want _us_. I just... Yeah.” Arthur stopped talking. Arthur decided that he’d talked enough. 

Eames was still staring at him. Arthur wondered if he was even breathing. Then Eames licked his lips and said, “Arthur—”

“No,” Arthur said, suddenly wildly terrified of the response. Getting it all out had been one thing. Having to hear Eames’s reply was quite another. “No. Don’t answer me now. Think about it. Think about…all of it…and if you don’t want it, it’s fine, we’ll just…run into each other on a job someday and it’ll be just like always, just like it ever was. I won’t be a…lunatic about this. But if you _do_ want it…if you think you could…then find me.” 

Eames kept staring. 

Arthur nodded once, and then turned and called the elevator and walked onto it when it came. And then he walked London for so long that his feet hurt in his shoes. 

When he got back to the suite Eames was gone. 

***

Eames went to Jakarta, and rented a depressing little room, and drank a lot to keep himself from thinking. 

It didn’t help. 

The only thing he thought about was Arthur. Arthur with his soul laid bare in front of him. Arthur with his dark eyes wide and young and wanting _him_. Arthur giving him every precious thing he could and then thinking, in some delusional part of his brain, that Eames could take all of it and not hurt him with magnificent cruelty. Because Eames was _Eames_ , and he was bad at relationships, fucking terrible at them, and Arthur was _Arthur_ , Arthur was…Arthur. He couldn’t possibly be in love with Eames. It was clear Arthur hadn’t been joking, but maybe he’d been drugged, maybe it had been the aftereffects of the Somnacin. 

Eames had checked his totem fifteen times after Arthur had walked out that day, and he was apparently in reality. He was still in reality. A reality where Arthur _loved_ him. 

And Arthur wanted… _things_. Arthur wanted really pedestrian and…rather lovely _things_. A _home_ with him, somewhere in the world. Discussions about milk. Someone to call in the night when you were lonely and job-related insomnia had kicked in. Someone who would answer with a smile in his voice and Eames could say, as he had always really wanted to say, _Darling, I’m missing you like crazy, what are you wearing?_ And Arthur would purr, smile still in his voice, _Dunhill_. 

Eames lay awake at night in his miserable room in Jakarta and wanted Arthur and Arthur’s vision of the world so acutely that it was a physical ache with every breath he took. 

Eames left Jakarta. He went to Paris, where Arthur seemed to sigh at him from every cobblestone and alleyway. He sat in cafes and thought of Arthur. He drank too much wine and too much coffee, ate too much cheese and too much pate. And he bought himself canvas and some paints, and sat in front of an easel. 

And started to paint.

***

Arthur went to Stockholm first. Then he went to Los Angeles. Dom took one look at him and asked what Eames had done, and Arthur said nothing, that it had just been a bad job. Arthur gave the kids presents, and Dom tried to take him out to get him drunk, and Arthur said he had a headache and rented a car and drove out of L.A. because he had always fucking hated L.A. 

He didn’t realize he was going home until he pulled into his parents’ driveway. And then he thought that it was idiotic of him. To come running home like a stupid puppy whose tail had been stepped on. Arthur hated himself, hated how mopey he felt, hated how much he missed Eames, how being without him now was like trying to breathe underwater. It was so stupid and proved that Sherlock had been wrong, and it was worse now that he’d said it all. 

His parents greeted him like he was some kind of conquering hero. His mother’s eyes were misty over how much she claimed he had grown (he hadn’t) and over the fanciness of his suit (well, it _was_ a nice suit) and over how old he was looking, wearing his hair like that (exactly). They called Danielle and had her come over with the kids, and it was all happy homecoming nonsense.

Arthur lay awake on his childhood bed the entire night, staring up at the ceiling. 

After a few days at home, it was clear he was dragging, not getting better. He felt listless with his exhaustion. Part of him wanted to pull out the PASIV where it was tucked among his luggage and try to get some relief, but he was terrified of dreaming of Eames and secretly pleased that he was having trouble sleeping because it meant he didn’t have to worry about Eames showing up in his head, in his subconscious, since he showed up in his conscious quite enough for him. 

Danielle eventually said, “So what is it? Are you dying?” 

Arthur had been drying dishes after dinner and he almost dropped the one he was on. “Jesus, Dani, some tact, do you think?” 

“You come home looking like hell and you’re quiet and you never smile, so I’m thinking either you’re dying or some idiot broke your heart and now I have to go kick his ass.” Danielle perched cheerfully on the counter next to him, as if she were still a kid and not a mother in her own right. 

Arthur shook his head at her and said, “I’m fine.” 

“Oh, God, we’re in trouble,” said Danielle. “You never say that unless you’re falling apart.” 

“I’m not falling apart. I never fall apart. I am always cool, calm, and collected.” 

Danielle practically fell off the counter laughing. “Where’d you get that idea?” 

Arthur frowned at her. “I’ll have you know that I have an impeccable reputation for keeping calm under pressure.” 

“Yeah,” Danielle said indulgently, grinning at him. “Sure you do.” She ruffled his hair and Arthur ducked away, grumbling. “I’m sure you break your fair share of eggs in the kitchen.” 

“And then I make an omelet,” Arthur informed her primly. 

Danielle’s grin was wide and uncomplicated and full of dimples, and Arthur didn’t think he’d ever grinned like that in his life. “I have a new boyfriend.” 

“Oh, great,” said Arthur. “So I’m the one who has to do the ass-kicking, huh? I was really hoping to get a break from that for a bit.”

“He’s nice.” 

“You always think they’re nice,” Arthur pointed out. 

“But he really is.” Danielle caught his hand and looked deadly serious at him. “Arthur, I mean it. He’s nice. He’s not going to run off with his secretary and leave me with two kids.” 

“Your standards really need to be higher, Dani,” Arthur sighed, but pulled her into a hug and kissed the top of her head. 

“I didn’t think you’d come home. You almost never do. I didn’t want you to worry, so I didn’t mention him,” said Danielle against his shoulder. 

Arthur closed his eyes and thought how he was the world’s worst big brother. “He makes you happy?” 

Danielle nodded against him. “A lot. A lot more than your idiot boyfriend makes you.” 

“I don’t have an idiot boyfriend,” Arthur said. “Am I going to meet the one boyfriend we have in our family?” 

“Only if you’re not going to pretend you’ve got a gun in your suit jacket.” 

Arthur _did_ have a gun in his suit jacket when he met Danielle’s boyfriends, it wasn’t _pretending_. So he said honestly, “Dani, I never _pretend_ that.” 

***

They were walking from the parking lot to the restaurant for dinner with Danielle’s boyfriend when Arthur patted himself down. The weight of his gun was solid, as was the weight of his totem, but he didn’t have his phone. 

Because Danielle had used it to forward Nick the restaurant reservation. 

“Oh, fuck, I left it in the car,” Arthur said, drawing to a halt. 

“Arthur, your language,” his mother scolded him. 

Danielle, who was a total kiss-up, said, “I’m always telling him it shows a lack of imagination, his language.” 

“I’ve got to get my phone,” he said, ignoring both of them. 

“This isn’t just to get out of meeting Nick, is it?” Danielle called after him. 

“No, the gun in my pocket and I are very excited to meet Nick!” Arthur called back to her, and jogged to the car. 

And stopped before he reached it, with the prickling sensation that he was being watched. He closed one hand around the totem in his pocket and the other hand around his gun and walked with slow, deliberate steps to his car, keeping his attention on the corner of his eye. Lightning flashed, illuminating that there was definitely someone in the shadows watching him. 

Arthur never let his guard down, not even when he was home. He was mostly furious that he’d exposed home in this way in the first place. He should never have even come here. 

The gun was up and cocked and out and Eames said, “Careful, I’m not actually a dream.” 

Arthur lowered his gun slowly and took his die out of his pocket and checked, rolling it on the hood of the car, as he watched Eames approach. Four. Apparently he was telling the truth. Arthur replaced his die warily and watched him. 

Eames stopped within reaching distance and stuck his hands in his pockets and said, “What are you doing to your hair these days, darling?”

Arthur said, because he couldn’t stand it, “Why are you here?” 

“You said to find you,” said Eames, and took a step closer. “I wanted to tell you.” Eames took a deep breath and Arthur’s heart pounded wildly and his entire life hung in the balance. “I love you, too. I—”

Arthur never heard the rest of what Eames was going to tell him, because Arthur twisted a hand into Eames’s terrible, terrible shirt and hauled him up against him for a kiss. And God, what a kiss. Arthur felt like it was the first kiss he’d ever had where his eyes were wide open, even though his eyes were shut. And maybe it was. 

Eames pressed him back against the car and tipped his hips against his, and Arthur lifted a leg to hook around his waist to adjust their fit against each other. 

“Christ, I’ve missed you,” Eames mumbled into his mouth, while his hands messily untucked Arthur’s shirt. “I missed the sounds you make when my hands are on you.” Eames bit under his jaw. 

Arthur absolutely did _not_ make any sound in response to that. He gasped, “I didn’t miss you at all,” and closed his hands in Eames’s hair and pulled him downward. 

Eames took the hint, scrabbling with Arthur’s tie, nosing his collar out of the way so he could try to get to his collarbone. 

“I had a parade of men,” said Arthur. 

Eames chuckled and yanked at Arthur’s shirt hard enough that he felt a button give way. 

“They were all less annoying than you,” said Arthur. 

Eames hummed and bit at Arthur’s shoulder. 

Arthur didn’t make a sound then, either. 

Eames lifted his head up and said, “But did any of them have my devastating fashion sense, love? Be honest.” 

“Devastating,” said Arthur. “Good word choice.” And kissed him. 

“I love you so much,” Eames mumbled against him. “So much. You’ve no idea. I’m crazy for you.” 

Arthur shuddered against him and went for Eames’s belt. “We can’t do this here,” he said, even as he undid it. 

“And yet,” remarked Eames, watching Arthur go for his fly. 

“Get me in this car right now and take me somewhere or I swear to fucking God—”

“Are you kidding me?” Eames said, sounding amused. “I’m not taking you anywhere at the moment, you’re on a roll.”

Arthur glared at him, an act which he knew was lessened by the fact that his hands were in Eames’s pants. “If I didn’t love you so much, I’d hate you.” 

Eames’s eyelids flickered. “I’d, um, love to hear more about that, if you…” Eames gave up, tipping his head forward to mumble into Arthur’s neck, “ _Christ_ , if you stop, I’ll kill you, _Arthur_.” 

Arthur bit his ear. 

Eames groaned. 

Danielle said, “Arthur, Mom said there’s an umbrella in the—”

Eames, of course, went for his _fucking gun_. 

Danielle froze and said, “Oh,” and Arthur was sure she didn’t even know which part of this whole tableau to be more horrified about. 

Arthur grabbed for Eames’s gun. 

Eames said, suddenly, faintly, as if the realization had just dawned on him. “ _Sister_.” 

“Yes,” Arthur glared at him, stuffing the gun back into Eames’s coat. “Sister. Danielle. Danielle, this is—”

“A person who was attacking you against the car and then pulled a gun on me?” guessed Danielle. 

“A person who is going to do his trousers up and then absolutely do formal, polite introductions,” said Eames pleasantly, ducking around to the other side of the car. 

“You’re the boyfriend,” said Danielle, not taking her eyes off of Eames, and Arthur wished some assassins would come out of the dark and save him from this horrible situation. 

“The boyfriend?” Eames echoed, sounding pleased. 

Arthur glared at him again. 

Eames said cheerfully, “Nope, never seen this man before in my life. Good kisser, though. _Very_ snappy dresser.” 

“Shut,” Arthur told him very carefully. “Up.” He turned to Danielle. “Eames was just—”

“Eames.” Danielle looked delighted. “All the things I’m finding out about you. Your name, you’re British, you’re—”

“Hot?” Eames suggested. 

“Kind of a jerk,” said Danielle, and Eames’s face fell comically. “He has been mooning around over you, you know.” Danielle jabbed a finger at Arthur. 

“No, I haven’t,” Arthur told Eames quickly. 

“I don’t even think he _sleeps_. Whatever fight you had, I’m guessing you made it up?” 

“Or we just can’t keep our hands off each other,” said Eames. 

“We made it up,” Arthur told Danielle, “only now I hate him.” 

“Easy come, easy go,” said Eames with a dramatic sigh. 

“Give us a second,” Arthur told Danielle. 

“Arthur, I—”

“Thank you,” Arthur said, turning Danielle and bodily marching her a little way away. Then he darted back to the car and opened it and ducked inside. 

So did Eames. 

Arthur looked at him. “What are you doing?” 

“Oh, I thought we were going to have a private conversation in the car.” 

“No, I have to get my phone and apparently the fucking umbrella. Do you have a room here?” 

“In Iowa City? You’re asking me if I have a room in Iowa City?” 

“Yes, that’s what I’m asking you.” 

“No, Arthur, because it’s bloody _Iowa City_. I was coming to tell you, yes, I love you, I’m all in, let’s pick a corner of the world and tumble into bed for a few days and let this corner of the world not be _Iowa City_.” 

“Get a room,” Arthur said, ignoring all of this. “I have to have dinner with my family and then I’ll come find you.” 

“Oh, fuck,” Eames sighed. “All right, fine, I _do_ have a room, I had to put my stuff _somewhere_ , but we’re not spending days in Iowa City, okay? I was going to whisk you off to Paris; I’ve got this little garret rented.” 

“Eames, I own a place in the Sixth Arrondisement.” 

“Of course you bloody do,” said Eames. 

Danielle ducked her head into the car with them and said, “You’re coming to dinner, Eames, of course.” 

And Eames, damn him to hell, said, “Oh, of course!”


	30. Chapter 30

Chapter 30

They got soaking wet on the way back to the restaurant. Arthur looked like a frowny little drowned rat, and Eames thought this was hilarious and that Arthur’s sister was utterly fantastic, and then Arthur’s mother said, “What took so long— Who’s this?” and Eames realized he hadn’t actually thought this through because now he was meeting Arthur’s _parents_ and he was a _mess_. 

Arthur said, “Mom, Dad, this is Eames.” 

“Eames?” echoed Arthur’s mother, looking like she didn’t know what to make of that. 

“Better than my first name,” Eames informed her gallantly, executing a kiss over her hand. “Which is Aloysius.” He winked. 

“Not true,” said Arthur, long-suffering. 

“Lovely to meet you,” said Arthur’s mother, turning a gratifying shade of pink. “But who are you?”

“This is the boyfriend Arthur’s been mooning over this whole time,” said Danielle helpfully. 

“I haven’t been _mooning_ ,” said Arthur. 

“Boyfriend,” said Arthur’s father dubiously, and took in Eames’s bedraggled appearance. 

“Where’s _your_ boyfriend?” Arthur asked Danielle. “Isn’t that what this evening was supposed to be all about?” 

“My boyfriend’s already at the table, perfectly dry and put-together, because we weren’t just trying to have sex up against Mom’s car,” said Danielle cheekily, before walking further into the restaurant to greet the man who stood up at the table. 

Arthur’s parents both blinked in astonishment at Arthur. 

“We weren’t,” said Arthur, now beet-red, and Eames thought of that blush all over Arthur’s body being absolutely _wasted_. “We really, really weren’t.” 

“Your shirt is now missing a button,” said Arthur’s mother drily. 

“I was apologizing,” Eames jumped in, trying to help. “For being a truly terrible boyfriend.” 

“He _is_ a horrible boyfriend,” Arthur agreed fervently. 

“Except when I’m really a fantastic boyfriend,” said Eames. 

“He’s a horrible boyfriend,” Arthur assured his parents. 

Eames frowned at him. “No, no, I am, for the most part, an excellent boyfriend.” 

Arthur’s mother said, with a firmness that made Eames think of being put in his place by Arthur himself during tricky extractions, “I don’t know what you did to make him look the way he looked lately, but you are never to do it again, and we’ll check back in twenty years or so on what kind of boyfriend I think you are.” 

Eames could think of nothing to do but agree, “Okay.” 

“Horrible,” Arthur whispered in Eames’s ear, as his parents walked away to greet Nick. 

“Shut up,” Eames hissed back. “You’re worse than I am, throwing me under the bus like this. I came to _Iowa City_ for you.” 

Arthur looked at him, his eyes dark and somber, and he said, suddenly not teasing at all, “You did.” And then he just as suddenly pressed his face into Eames’s neck. 

Eames, caught off-guard, awkwardly smoothed Arthur’s damp hair down and kissed his head and said, “Hey. Okay?” 

Arthur nodded against him but didn’t straighten up. 

Arthur’s sister gave Eames a thumbs-up sign. 

***

Arthur pulled Eames aside at the end of the meal, but Eames didn’t hear what he was going to say because Arthur’s sister came up to them and said to her brother, “You know how you’re going to give Nick that whole speech about not breaking my heart?” 

“Yes,” said Arthur slowly, warily. 

“Go do it so I can give the same speech to Eames,” said Danielle, and practically shoved him away. 

Eames had never been given such a speech before and had no idea how he was supposed to receive it. 

But Danielle surprised him by starting with, “You’re not really an artist.” 

Eames considered and settled on saying, delicately, “I’m good at art.” 

“You carry a gun,” Danielle pointed out. 

“Well,” began Eames. 

“So does my brother,” said Danielle. 

Eames was wisely silent. 

“The thing is that I don’t care. I know he thinks I don’t know, and I know he’s probably not telling me because he’s trying to keep me safe, because that’s how Arthur is. And when my husband ran off and I had two little kids and I didn’t know what I was going to do, do you know who saved my life? It was Arthur. So I don’t care what mysterious thing it is he really does for a living. I know him. I know that he has a good heart and he’s a good person. So I want him to be happy, and he has been happy, and I’m saying all this because I swear to God, Eames, when he loves he _loves_ and he will never stop, no matter what, and I need you recognize that, okay?” 

Danielle looked nearly close to tears, and Eames felt tight with panic. He said, honestly, “I don’t think I’m the best person for Arthur to have decided to love.”

“You are. Because you realize what a gem he is, enough to be terrified by him. And that’s a good thing. I like the way he looks at you, like he can’t believe his luck. But I like better the way _you_ look at him, like you can’t believe your luck more.” Danielle startled Eames with a hug. Eames looked at Arthur over Danielle’s shoulder, who looked as alarmed as Eames felt. “Take care of him for me.” 

“That I can do,” Eames said, because he’d been trying to do it for years now. 

“Good,” said Danielle, and kissed his cheek. “You’re lovely.” She turned just in time for Arthur to walk suspiciously up. “He’s lovely,” she told Arthur. 

Arthur narrowed his eyes at Eames. “Not really,” he said. 

Danielle laughed. “God, look at you, pretending not to be smitten. You’re doing a terrible job.” She corralled him into a hug. 

“ _Smitten_ ,” repeated Arthur, looking horrified. 

“I have to go relieve the sitter,” Danielle said. 

“I’m going with Eames,” Arthur said. 

“I assumed. At least make it to the room this time, boys.” 

Arthur looked aghast. “Tell Mom and Dad for me.” 

“I don’t think they want to know,” Danielle called back as she left. 

“Not about the room thing!” Arthur called after her. 

“I like your sister a lot,” Eames informed him. 

“She’s awful,” said Arthur. “All of them are awful.” 

“None of them are awful,” said Eames, and put his hand on Arthur’s neck and rubbed a circle behind Arthur’s ear, because Arthur had always found that soothing, even before he’d been willing to admit that he felt better with Eames’s hands on him. 

Arthur said, “Give me just one second,” and took his die out and rolled it on the table. 

Eames looked down at the resulting four and said, “Darling, we’re in Iowa City. There’s no way this is a dream.” 

***

The room was a sad, sorry, dreary little affair, and Arthur, feeling tense now that this moment was upon them, turned a nervous circle in it. They had been silent for the entirety of the ride there, and Arthur felt both like they’d said every word there was to say and that they could never say enough of them. 

Eames said to him, “You’re absolutely dazzling in this room, petal.” 

“That’s not hard to be,” said Arthur. 

Eames took his poker chip out of his pocket and looked at it before flipping it onto the nightstand. 

“We’re in the most depressing room in all of Iowa City,” Arthur pointed out, a bit mockingly. “There’s no way this is a dream.” 

“Ah,” said Eames, and walked over to Arthur, and then kept walking, until he had him against the wall, and then he breathed into him. “But you’re standing in the most depressing room in all of Iowa City and you look absolutely dazzling and you’re all mine, and if this is a dream, I want you to keep me below until all of the stars fall out of the sky, okay?” 

Arthur’s breath caught, and he would have kissed Eames, except Eames said, stepping away and sounding almost shy, “I brought you something.” 

Arthur was confused. “You did?” He watched Eames go over to his bag and pull out…a packaging tube. “My Titian?” Arthur said in delight, as Eames handed it across to him. “Did you actually steal me a Titian?” 

But it wasn’t a Titian. It was…Paris. Paris stretching away from him, all jumbled perspective, rooftops and doors and windows and a dreamy Eiffel Tower in the distant corner but it worked somehow, bright and blocky and yet almost smeared like a watercolor, some combination of Kandinsky and Monet. And, in the foreground, someone who was very clearly Arthur, sitting at a sidewalk café, leaned back on his seat, long, lean legs kicked out, clad in pale gray, his profile tipped away from the viewer toward the Eiffel Tower, but Arthur could recognize himself, could see how lovingly and vividly he’d been painted, the attention to detail of an Old Master. 

Arthur stared at the painting. 

Eames said, “It’s, like, every artistic style in the world all at once, jumbled together. It’s the problem with forgery. I can’t paint like me, I just paint like everyone else, and it—I should have just stolen you the Titian. I was going to, I was really going to—”

“ _Eames_ ,” said Arthur, low and reverent. “Oh my God, _Eames_.” He looked up at him, looking so absurdly nervous. For what possible reason, wondered Arthur. “Did you paint this for me?” 

“Of course I did,” said Eames, and then, even more absurdly, “Do you like it?” 

“ _Eames_ ,” said Arthur, and dropped the painting and tackled him to the bed. “Oh my God, I _love_ it.” 

“You don’t have to—”

“Shut up,” said Arthur, kissing him into compliance. “Shut up, shut up, shut up. I love it. I’m going to bring it everywhere with me. I’m going to sleep with it in my bed.” 

“You’ll ruin it,” said Eames, sounding embarrassed. 

“I’m going to take it to dinner with me. I’m going to carry it around with me to jobs and tell everyone my boyfriend made it for me.” 

“It’s just a bloody painting, Arthur,” said Eames, almost squirming now with his embarrassment. 

Arthur was delighted by this. He kissed behind Eames’s ear and said, “But I didn’t get you anything!” 

Eames said, “Idiot, you got me _you_.” 

Arthur paused, stopped moving, stopped nibbling and kissing, just stopped. 

“Arthur?” said Eames uncertainly, after a moment. 

Arthur shifted, stretching out over him, looking down at him. He said, “I love you. I told you I—”

“And it’s the stupidest thing, Arthur,” Eames said, all in a rush. “It’s really the stupidest thing you’ve ever done. Have you ever even _seen_ you? You’re… You’re… Go and fall in love with someone really incredible, Arthur, what the hell are you _doing_?” 

“I see me every time I look in the mirror,” Arthur said. “You’re the one who doesn’t see you, because when you look in a mirror all you ever see is everybody else you could be. You always miss _you_ , and I didn’t realize that until just this moment.” 

“It…” Eames looked awkward underneath him. “That’s not true, I—”

“But it’s okay,” Arthur told him firmly. “Because I see you. I see everything about you. And if you tell me you want me, you can have me forever.” 

Eames blinked up at him. He said, “I’ve wanted you for so long that I can’t remember what it was like not to want you.” 

Arthur reached for Eames’s poker chip, read _Cassino_ on it. 

Eames said, “We’re in the worst hotel room in all of Iowa City, petal.” 

“Yes, we are, you cheap bastard,” agreed Arthur, putting the poker chip back. “Let’s break the fucking bed.” 

***

“I thought you were seducing me the whole time,” Arthur said against him. 

“I was,” said Eames. 

“Right, but I didn’t think you _meant_ it.” 

“I meant it so much I couldn’t show you how much I meant it,” said Eames. 

“Your ears were red the day we met,” Arthur said sleepily. “Sunburn. You’d been on the beach, seducing the blonde twins. You had the ugliest pair of sunglasses on. You were such a smug, arrogant prick. I hated you _so_ much that I loved you.” 

Eames, amused, kissed Arthur’s nearest bit of skin, and Arthur hummed happily. “You were wearing a blazer on that bloody beach. A _blazer_ , Arthur. It was Carnival in Rio. You were so fucking annoying I couldn’t imagine how dull my life would be without you.” 

“Do you think we have a healthy relationship?” asked Arthur. 

Eames laughed. “Do you _want_ a healthy relationship?” 

“I want you.” Arthur paused. “But I’m going to start making you eat a little better.” 

“Not unless you start bribing me with sex acts every time I eat a carrot.” 

“What if I fellate the carrot?” asked Arthur. 

“Make it a courgette and we’re getting somewhere,” said Eames. 

“A _courgette_ ,” mocked Arthur. “God, you’re annoying.” He kissed Eames’s chest. 

Eames drifted his fingertips up and down Arthur’s bare skin and closed his eyes, thinking he might sleep for the first time in a while. 

Arthur said, his voice barely more than a whisper, “Have you thought this through?” 

“Depends on your definition of that,” responded Eames. “I thought Paris and lots of sex, and then, who knows? Is that thinking it through?” 

“We’re going to make each other vulnerable.” 

“We already do that, as Mycroft so elegantly proved.” 

“Right, but now people will _know_ that we make each other vulnerable.”

“Darling,” said Eames, “let someone try to harm you. I’d really like to see them try. We’re a pair now, you and I. We’re better together than apart.” 

Arthur chuckled. “That’s what Dom told me, too.” 

“Oh, God, I sound like _Dom_?” said Eames, sounding horrified. 

“Quick, say something very un-Dom-like.” 

“‘Sorry for almost getting all of you killed during that inception job, here’s some extra cash for your trouble.’”

Arthur snorted. “Christ, I can’t wait to have dinner with the pair of you.”

“If he’s nice to you, then I’ll be a sodding angel,” Eames promised.

“He _is_ nice to me,” Arthur said. 

“Have you slept since London?” Eames asked. 

Arthur paused tellingly before admitting, “Not really.” 

“Me, either. So let’s sleep now and talk in the morning.” 

“I took a job,” Arthur said in a rush. 

Eames blinked his eyes open and looked at him. “Oh,” he said. 

“A couple of days ago,” Arthur went on. “After Danielle said I was mooning. And I—I _was_ , kind of. Not a lot. I mean. Just a little. Anyway. I thought you weren’t coming, and I had to move on, and I took a job. It’s…nothing complicated, but I took it.” 

“Right,” said Eames, processing. 

“I thought you weren’t coming.” 

“No, I know,” said Eames. “I’m not… Of course, take the job, of course. I didn’t think you’d… It’s fine.” 

“But I have nothing after that. One job, and then nothing. Tons of space cleared. We’ll go somewhere, just the two of us, and we’ll figure all this out.” 

“Yes,” Eames agreed. “That’s a plan.” He ducked down and kissed the corner of Arthur’s mouth. “You find me this time.”


	31. Chapter 31

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here we are, somehow, already. At the end of Part I. YES. PART I. THAT'S HOW LONG THIS FIC IS. I remember when I started posting I was like, "Oh, look how lovely and long it is, I'll buy myself all sorts of time to write other stuff!" Which I did. But it was so long ago that I was still so worried about my Arthur and my Eames and now I read bits of this fic over and I'm like, "Aww, look at my babies, we've come so far together, boys." Heh. Fics are journeys for all of us. 
> 
> I have, of course, as always, so many people to thank. I thanked them in the first chapter, and I bookend with thanking them here: snookiescookies and mykmyk and Kristin for checking my sanity; knackorcraft for doing a close reading and making sure it made sense and the characters worked and generally seven million other things; and arctacuda, as ever, who always knows just how something should be tweaked to re-work it and is very patient when I go off on crazy tangents and copes with my constant mild hysteria. Through their efforts, this fic is a much, much, much better fic than it was when it first came out of my head. 
> 
> Also, thank you to all of you for sticking with it, if you were new to the Inception fandom or the Sherlock fandom or if they were both already favorites of yours. Your comments were unfailingly good feedback and you helped to shape this fic more than any of you know because you don't get to see how the drafts change in response to how you guys react. But you're all so helpful, and lovely, and delightful, and I love to write for all of you, so thank you for reading.

Epilogue

_“But I have nothing after that. One job, and then nothing. Tons of space cleared. We’ll go somewhere, just the two of us, and we’ll figure all this out.”_

_“Yes,” Eames agreed. “That’s a plan.” He ducked down and kissed the corner of Arthur’s mouth. “You find me this time.”_

And Arthur did. When the job was over, he found Eames on an island, lounging by the ocean, tanned almost beyond recognition. Arthur wore khakis and shirts that he left unbuttoned and untucked. Eames generally wore nothing at all and thought Arthur was a spoilsport. They drank rum and, on occasion, too much rum, which was when they ended up dancing to reggae from distant bars on the beach under moonlight, and Arthur thought they were so ridiculously, over-the-top _sickening_ together, and he didn’t fucking care, because he was happier than he’d ever been in his life. They took turns reading Ian Fleming novels aloud to one another, waxing poetic about the first time they’d read each one, and complaining about the follow-up novels. Eames painted with stormy inspiration, oceanside watercolors and rich, vibrant oils of Arthur in bed, in a hammock, on the sand, in the shower. He coaxed Arthur into painting once and Arthur got paint on a $300 shirt and pouted over it. Eames asked him why he’d even _brought_ a $300 shirt to an island, and Arthur had said that it had been _linen_ and thus _islandwear_ , and then Eames had just had to have sex with him because he was too fantastic a creature not to just fall on top of every once in a while. So Arthur didn’t paint, but he ate lots of fruit while sprawled in Eames’s vicinity as he painted, a hand around Eames’s ankle, stroking absently, or a foot hooked around Eames’s calf, in lazy possession. The other island inhabitants asked them how they were enjoying their honeymoon, with fond and knowing smiles, and Eames and Arthur said, yes, yes, very much. And the sex was spectacular and the sleep was good and Arthur said, late one night, into the safe confessional of bed with Eames, “If this is what limbo was like for Mal, I get why she never wanted to leave.” And Eames didn’t say anything to that but he took Arthur’s die and he rolled it over and over and over again, and Arthur lay tucked against Eames and watched it. Four, four, four, four…

“I don’t think we’re going to get sick of each other, pet,” Eames said one day, lazily, one foot on the sand so he could nudge their hammock back and forth. 

Arthur grunted against him. “I was sick of you ages ago, it’s just that you make a good pillow.” 

“I try to have my uses,” said Eames, and took a sip of the beer he was nursing. “What do you say we go back to real life?” 

“This is real life,” Arthur said, and patted the poker chip resting next to him on Eames’s chest. 

“I mean Paris,” said Eames. 

“Well, if you meant Paris, you should have just said so. You can always get me to go to Paris.” 

“I know your magic words now. Paris, Prada, courgette.” 

“Shut up,” said Arthur, and stretched up to kiss him. “Let’s go home, Mr. Eames.” 

***

Sherlock, at first, was fine after the whole thing. Absolutely fine. Aggressively fine. 

And then he fell asleep, and he dreamed of the roof of St. Bart’s. He dreamed of falling without John. He dreamed of John at his gravestone, sad and stoic as the marble. The dreams came and came and came, and in each of them he reached a hand out to John but couldn’t get him, couldn’t get him to _see_ , to _understand_ , that it had all been him, always. 

He thought of Arthur and wondered if he’d taken Sherlock’s advice, if he was happy somewhere with Eames, or if Sherlock had turned out to be wrong. Sherlock was seldom wrong, but there was always the chance that…

“Do you know what happened to Arthur and Eames?” he swallowed his pride enough to ask Mycroft one day, trying to sound casual about the whole thing. 

“Last I heard, they were in the South Pacific, some dismal little place, getting written up for public sex,” said Mycroft, with a moue of distaste. 

Sherlock drew a harsh chord down his violin and tried not to be jealous. 

“If you’re jealous,” said Mycroft, “you have no one to blame but yourself. You told Arthur to tell Eames, didn’t you?” 

“They were so sodding obvious,” sulked Sherlock. 

Mycroft arched an eyebrow at him. “And you’re not?” 

Sherlock threw a book at Mycroft. 

And Sherlock couldn’t sleep, he couldn’t sleep and go back to the dreams of John, of John not saying anything to him, or at least not saying what he wanted to hear, of him without John and John without him, and Sherlock grew snappish and then he grew sullen and then he grew sluggish and finally he tumbled into sleep when he couldn’t help it anymore, and he dreamed of coming home, of John smiling at him, of John’s _smile_. 

He woke up with John’s smile in his head, feeling heavy with sleep after so long without it. There was the sound of John in the kitchen, and Sherlock stumbled up and over, thinking, _Just say it. Don’t make a big deal out of it, just say it and see if he says it back. That’s all._

And he drew to a halt in the kitchen doorway, staring at the blonde at their kitchen table, sitting directly in _Sherlock’s spot_. 

“Oh,” said John, from where he was making _her_ tea. “Sorry, did we wake you? Didn’t mean to.” John spoke to the blonde. “This is my flatmate, Sherlock Holmes,” he said, and then, turning toward him, “Sherlock, this is Mary.” 

THE END (of Part I)

_I know, I know, I know, right? I’m ending it there? Well, not really, of course, Part II will start up in a couple of weeks, after a couple of connecting fics get posted. And, as a gesture of my goodwill, keep reading for a preview._

 

_Part II: Depending on Your Focus: Magnussen, or Sherlock & John_

Chapter 1

“Look at you,” said Eames, exhausted, tumbling into bed. “You didn’t even reach for your gun. I could have been anyone. I could have been an intruder.” 

“I knew you weren’t,” Arthur yawned. “Tate didn’t bark.”

“I could have been an intruder with peanut butter,” Eames said. “That dog is a tart.” 

“Welcome home,” said Arthur sleepily, and snuggled into him. “How was the flight?” 

“Didn’t crash.” 

“You smell like an airplane.” 

“Tell me about it.” 

“And also like chocolate milk.” 

“That’s an interesting story, but I’ve been in, like, five different time zones in the past four days, so I’ll tell you in the morning.” 

“You haven’t been lying to me about this job being a cakewalk and it was actually awful and now I need to put out hits on yet another stupid fucking incompetent team for you, have you?” demanded Arthur, sounding more awake than Eames would have liked. 

“You realize your tendency to try to kill people is the reason why I’d have to lie to you in the first place,” said Eames drily. 

“Yes, I’m a horrible person who wants to _keep you alive_.” 

“The job was fine. I’m just tired because I got back here to you as quickly as I could, and the airports are all a mess, and do you really think I could effectively lie to you anymore?” Because Eames couldn’t resist calling Arthur at least every day, just to hear his voice (which was only bearable because Arthur did the same, whenever they took jobs that separated them). It had been nearly a year, a Year of Arthur, and still Eames couldn’t resist calling him every day, relishing the fact that not only could he do that but that Arthur expected and welcomed it. And Eames called Arthur more when the jobs were frustrating and he needed to vent, and he wouldn’t have been able to resist snarling at Arthur if the job had been a disaster. 

“You could never lie to me,” Arthur pointed out confidently. 

“That’s what you always _thought_ ,” said Eames, pressing his nose into Arthur’s dear neck and inhaling Arthur’s familiar sleep-scent and thinking how glorious it was to be _home_. To have a place to call home, actually, and to have it be wherever this astonishing man was. Eames’s hand still itched for his totem, just to check. “That’s what I wanted you to think.” Eames settled, feeling the tension from the travel leak away from him as he fit himself around Arthur with effortless instinct. 

“Uh-huh.” Arthur’s hand came up and brushed through Eames’s hair, and Eames made an embarrassing noise of helpless approval. “And I totally let you think that.” Arthur’s lips made an appearance against his head, and then he said, “Sex later?” 

“Sex later,” agreed Eames. “I couldn’t even stay awake for sex now.” 

“I don’t really need for you to be awake,” said Arthur, lips dipping down across Eames’s temple, hands dipping down toward other places, and Eames thought that it _had_ been an incredibly long time since he’d had Arthur’s hands and not just the pixels of them over Skype.

“You’re actually the world’s most insulting person and I missed you like crazy,” Eames told him, and suddenly tackled him back onto the bed. 

“I thought you said sex later,” said Arthur, and dimpled up at him, and Eames’s heart thudded the way it still did, every single time, tipping right over at Arthur’s feet. 

“Yeah. I lied to you,” said Eames. “Still got it.”

“I hate you,” said Arthur. 

“Oh, darling, I know,” said Eames, with a grin, before he made it his own personal mission to get Arthur to admit that no, actually, he really, really loved him. 

Eames was very good at that particular mission. 

***

Eames woke to bright sunshine and Tate in Arthur’s spot in the bed. 

“Morning,” Eames yawned at him, and Tate wagged his fluffy little tail and pounced onto Eames’s chest, and Eames covered him with kisses because Arthur wasn’t around to see that yes, Eames spoiled the dog. 

Tate settled down, and Eames scratched behind his ears and looked up at the Titian over the bed. The placement had been Arthur’s idea, because Arthur had a devious streak that Eames hadn’t previously suspected. Eames had consented only because he liked the idea of being extravagant enough to have priceless art on their ceiling, but he’d told Arthur the first time he was called _Titian_ in bed the thing was coming down. 

Which meant Eames was almost always called _Titian_ in bed these days, and he’d developed a bloody Pavlovian response to the name.

Eames rolled himself out of bed and went in search of Arthur or coffee. He dragged himself through the small living room, where his first Paris painting of Arthur hung over the fireplace, because Arthur insisted it wasn’t redundant to have a painting of Paris in a flat in Paris. The door to their tiny balcony was propped open and a breeze was coming in, giving away Arthur’s location, so Eames paused for coffee first. There was a fresh pot in the kitchen, and Eames called out, “Bless you, darling!” 

“I didn’t sneeze!” Arthur called back. 

“For the _coffee_ , pet,” Eames clarified, pouring himself a cup, and it was halfway to his mouth, the first glorious sip almost there…

And then he spotted the Kandinsky, propped up against the kitchen counter. 

Eames blinked at it, and then he stumbled his way onto their balcony. “There’s a Kandinsky in our kitchen,” he told Arthur. 

“Is there?” said Arthur, and filled in a word in the crossword puzzle he was doing. 

“ _Arthur_.” 

“Happy birthday,” Arthur said, and looked up at him, beaming with pride at his own ingenuity. “Slightly belated. Sorry we missed it.” 

Eames shook his head to show how much that didn’t matter. Arthur’s last job had run over and interfered with Eames’s birthday, and Arthur had obviously felt awful about it even though Eames hadn’t cared and even though it clearly hadn’t been Arthur’s fault since Arthur’s jobs almost always ran like clockwork. And it was Eames who had had another job scheduled that had overlapped with the end of Arthur’s, and altogether it had been far too long since they had been in the same place at the same time. Eames thought he’d needed no bonus on the perfection of his current morning, and Arthur was _amazing_ for having arranged such a bonus. “Is it a forgery, or stolen, or legally purchased?” he asked. 

“I thought you’d prefer to figure that out on your own,” said Arthur. 

“ _Madame_ Fouchard, kindly turn around, I’m going to give my boyfriend a blow job right here on this balcony!” Eames shouted to their neighbor. 

“ _Bonjour, monsieur_!” she called back happily, because she didn’t speak a word of English.

Eames didn’t drop to his knees, though. He leaned forward and gave Arthur a kiss. Just a kiss. Because he was _Arthur_ , and Eames loved him so much that he was dizzy with it, even on mornings when Arthur didn’t surprise him with Kandinskys (fake or otherwise) over coffee. 

And Arthur kissed him back, in that miraculous way he had, that way of saying, _Yes, I love you, too_. 

“Best gift ever,” Eames mumbled, and didn’t really mean the Kandinsky. “Thank you, darling.”

“You’re welcome. I’m glad you like it.”

“I don’t like it, I _love_ it.” 

“Even better,” Arthur smiled. “Now sit down and have your coffee. Look, I ran out and got you a croissant, too.” 

“Being home is the _best_ ,” said Eames happily, as he sat and ate his croissant and pretended he didn’t slip bits to Tate. Arthur tipped his chair back and worked on his crossword puzzle and pretended not to see him slipping bits to Tate. 

“Are you awake now?” Arthur asked him eventually, setting his chair down on all four legs and putting his crossword puzzle aside. 

“I’ve been awake,” said Eames, poking a toe underneath the cuff of Arthur’s trousers so he could see what socks Arthur was wearing. 

“You’re never awake until after your first cup of coffee,” Arthur said. “I try to have conversations with you before your first cup of coffee, and you never remember them.” 

“That’s because they’re usually conversations about bloody dry cleaning, darling.” 

“You’re really a terrible person,” said Arthur. “I like it much better when you’re not home.” 

“But then who will drive you wild with lust until you’re begging to come?” asked Eames loudly, and Madame Fouchard waved cheerfully at him. 

“Would you stop in your attempt to teach our French neighbor English words only about sex?” 

“No, actually, because I like it.” He raised his voice. “Why, yes, darling, the lube _is_ hidden in the window box.” 

Arthur rolled his eyes. “Listen up, Titian.” 

“Oho, playing dirty now, are we?” 

“I’m always playing dirty, you just caught up. I got a call from an old friend.”

“Is it Saito? Because he pays well.”

“Sherlock Holmes,” said Arthur. 

Eames blinked. “Sherlock Holmes. Huh. What’s he want?” 

“He has a job for us.” 

“Christ, no.” 

“Eames.” 

“No, no, no.” Eames shook his head. “Arthur, that job was a fucking disaster and we’re lucky we’re alive. Absolutely not.” 

“Fine,” said Arthur. “You’re right. Of course you are. You don’t have to do it.” 

Eames looked at him. “ _I_ don’t have to do it?” 

Arthur fiddled with the mug that Eames knew had held hot chocolate that morning and said, “I owe him.” 

“You owe _him_? For what?” The idea boggled Eames’s mind. 

Arthur met his eyes. “He told me to tell you,” he said, simply. 

Eames looked at Arthur, whose hair was tumbled in loose waves and who was dressed in a T-shirt. A ridiculously expensive T-shirt, yes, but still just a T-shirt. Arthur, who looked not at all at the moment like the best point man in dreamsharing but just looked like a man eating breakfast with his boyfriend. They were sitting on their balcony with a table between them on which they’d eaten fresh croissants Arthur had run out to get, coffee Arthur had made for Eames because Arthur never drank coffee at home. He looked at their dog snoozing in the sun, at the living room beyond, with Arthur’s coffee table books on architecture and fashion and Eames’s dog-eared paperbacks. And he’d woken in their rumpled bed, well-shagged and comfortable in a way he’d never have thought possible, relaxed, _happy_. He’d woken up with a _home_ , which he’d never had before and had never even bothered to imagine. And he’d woken up with the knowledge of _Arthur_ , somewhere nearby and waiting for him, waiting to kiss him good morning, which he _had_ imagined but still couldn’t _believe_. Arthur, who procured him Kandinskys and croissants and coffees. Arthur, whose dimples used to be such a challenge for Eames and now Eames’s mere presence seemed enough to bring them forth. 

Eames rubbed the arch of his foot against Arthur’s calf and he sighed and said, “What does he need help with?” 

“Some guy named Magnussen,” said Arthur. 

_to be continued…_


End file.
